How to Promote a Recruitment Website in the US and Increase Traffic by 200% – The Huntly Case Study

The client

Huntly.ai is a platform that connects IT recruiters with international product companies. As a start-up that is actively developing in the American and European markets, it specializes in recruiting technical talent for US and European companies. Huntly’s mission is to revolutionize recruitment and simplify the hiring process for all parties.

Campaign objectives 

Our client’s target audience is employers who want to advertise vacancies on Huntly in search of candidates to join their business.

Accordingly, we had the following tasks:

1. Optimize the website for the target audience and ensure it meets all their needs. This would allow us to attract the first employers in the US. 
2. Increase visibility and organic traffic to the site, thereby increasing revenue from filled vacancies.

Team strategy

The recruitment niche is extremely crowded, so we started by carefully analyzing the competition and the site structure. 

At launch, huntly.ai only had two main categories. We recommended expanding the structure to meet the high, competitive standards of the niche. The partner implemented all of our recommendations promptly, allowing us to successfully implement changes and achieve results.

Technical optimization

A successful SEO campaign begins with a detailed review of the website for technical optimization. Based on the results of this review, we formulated the main recommendations for improving Huntly’s search ranking:

1. Optimize the page titles according to SEO best practices.
2. Markup H1 correctly. One common mistake is to mark a website's main heading as H2 or missing. It should be marked as H1 to improve the search engine bots’ understanding of the page content.

3. Optimize images. We provided recommendations for alt tags (description of the image in the code) to improve indexing.
4. Implement Open Graph for a better presentation of the site on social networks.

5. Perform a usability audit to identify and eliminate problems in user interaction with the site.
6. Set up robots.txt for correct website indexing.
7. Implement 301 redirects to redirect old URLs to new ones.
8. Implement breadcrumbs to improve site navigation.
9. Create an XML sitemap to facilitate search engine indexing.
10. Eliminate broken links, which will improve site quality and indexing.
11. Increase page loading speed by optimizing images and minimizing CSS and JavaScript files and caching.

Content marketing: expanding the site structure and creating more quality content

Creating and publishing high quality content was a key component of our strategy. We focused on extending the site structure to meet the needs of the target audience – employers. 

Currently, the structure of the For Employers category has two levels of nesting.

Based on a detailed analysis of user requirements, we created a keyword list and technical requirements for Huntly’s copywriters to use. This ensured high quality and useful content for site visitors.

Another important part was creating the information section of the blog. We understood that the recruitment niche requires constant updating of knowledge and sharing of experiences. That’s why Huntly focused on articles that would help solve real problems faced by professionals, such as the most effective talent acquisition strategies, technical interviewing techniques, and the latest trends in the world of IT recruitment. Each article was researched and written with the latest data and practical advice.

Once implemented, the blog was complete with the most relevant topics.

Building partnerships

By working with news sites and reputable sources, we obtained high-quality backlinks that allowed us to build and develop a basic link profile. This is also an important factor for high rankings on search engine results. Huntly’s team averaged 8–9 placements per month.

Initially, articles on external platforms were linked to two main categories and the main page of the site. After expanding the structure of huntly.ai, new link acceptors were added, significantly increasing the link profile.

Analyzing results and adjusting the marketing strategy

Regular monitoring of key performance indicators enabled us to make timely changes to our strategy. This included analysis of:

• Organic traffic
• Search engine rankings
• User engagement indicators

By analyzing the data, Huntly was able to adjust the content strategy to maximize results.

Promotion results

Over our eight-month collaboration (October 1, 2023 to June 9, 2024), Huntly achieved significant results.

1. Organic traffic: 

• The number of users increased by 193.29% and the number of sessions increased by 250.99%.
• The number of new users increased by 215.29%.

2. The time spent interacting with the site metric increased by 108.84%. This indicates that the content has become significantly more engaging and helpful.
3. Search engine impressions increased by 46453%.
4. Number of clicks increased by 8681%.
5. Number of pages indexed increased from six to 64.

6. Number of search queries for which the site is ranked went up by a whopping 12122% (from 18 queries to 2200).

7. The number of domains linking to the Huntly resource also increased from 26 to 144. 
   
   This means that other sites increasingly trust huntly.ai and are willing to link to it. This has a positive effect on the search engine rankings.

8.  Domain rating increased from 6 to 24, which is a 300% increase.
   
   A higher DR makes a site more authoritative and competitive.

Testimonials

Dmitry Goncharov, Project Manager at Netpeak Agencies Group