Transcription
Hey everyone, this is David Cerns with Haley Marketing, and welcome to today's product demo webinar.
So today, we're going to be talking about a subject that is important to pretty much every staffing company on the planet, and that's your website. At Haley Marketing, we've been building websites since 2003, so this is uh, entering or finishing, I guess, the 18th year of website development. I've lost track of how many we've built. I think we host about 1700 of them now, so lots and lots of staffing websites. But things have changed, and they've really accelerated the pace of change in the last couple of years, and that's what we're going to talk about. You can kind of see by the sub-headline there, you know, it's no longer just a website; it's your digital branch office; it's the foundation for your online marketing. And we're going to talk today about a lot of topics. Um, this is probably less just demo and more education on how to create a really good staffing website, so I hope you'll all enjoy that. Along the way, if there are questions, because this is not just show and tell, please feel free to use the question window to ask them.
And actually, to get things warmed up, I've got a question for you. So I didn't do it as a poll; I'm just gonna ask you to use the Q&A bar, and I want you to tell me, on a one-to-ten scale, how you'd rate your website. Ten: it knocks it out of the park, love it, couldn't be better. One is the "don't look at my website; I'm embarrassed by it." But type in how you think about your current website, whether we built it for you or someone else did. What kind of scores would you give it? Again, 10 is it's amazing, knocks it out of the park; one is I don't want anyone to look. And use that Q&A please to give me your feedback on your website.
So lots coming in so far, thank you, and it's all over the place. I see some nines and no 10s. I come on, somebody's gotta have a 10. I do see at least one one, and so hopefully, uh, and one question is, "When will the webinar start?" Hopefully you're listening in already because we've started. Um, so the uh, the the response seems to be really all over the board, and it kind of polarized: either people are at the very high end or people at the very low end. And so today, you know, regardless of which end you're at, we'll try to give you some ideas to make your site better. And somebody just said, "We just launched a new site last March; I give it an eight." All right, Ellen, we'll see what we can do to make that eight jump up to a 10.
So kind of looking at some of the importance of website: what really matters most in a staffing website? Is it what it looks like—the design? Is it the copy, the message? Is it the technology platform that it's built on? Um, love to get your thoughts in the Q&A if you have, you know, which of those is it. Does it design, copy, technology? Is it something else? What do you think is most important in your website? Again, use that Q&A to share your thoughts with me. Tech, easy to use for applicants. Oh, Jonathan, you beat me to where I'm going next. Content and design simplicity. Kimberly, you have it too. User interface, automation. Oh, we're going to get to that, Isaac. So easy for job seekers. Yeah, we're going to get to that.
So I'm going to start with my answers: it was none of the above. It's not design; it's not copy; it's not technology. Those are all important, but a really great staffing website is about something called user intent; meaning thinking about the audiences who are coming to your website: how are they going to use it? And if you jump on Google, which I did, and you look up user intent, you might find a graphic or you find a lot of information that's somewhat like this that talks about four different types of user intent. There's a user who's got an intent of gathering information; they want to learn; they want to inquire; acquire information. It could be directly about staffing services; it could be about things related to talent or hiring or managing people, but the user's intent is simply to gain information. That the second type of intent is navigation: I'm looking to find something, and this is where we often go to Google, and we search for things because our intent is navigational: where do I find the answer to this question? What website, where can that content be found? Or today you're seeing more and more in Google: Google will show the answer to the question without somebody ever having to leave Google, and that means we have to design our websites differently to show those answers to people so they don't even have to get to our website. And that's thinking about someone who's got navigational intent. Then there's commercial intent, which is I'm trying to gather information to make a purchase decision. If I'm a job seeker, I'm looking for maybe job opportunities; I'm researching companies; I'm finding about markets I might move to if I'm going to relocate, so I'm using using this to gather the information that I need to make a purchase decision; or in the case of a job seeker, a and a decision to apply to a job or to accept an offer; or in the case of an employer, a decision to request talent, work with a specific staffing company. And the last type of intent is transactional: I'm ready to do something; I'm ready to apply to that job; I'm ready to request an employee, so I'm coming to your website to take an action.
Now the challenge for your website is thinking about your users, and this is always a battle for staffing companies: are my users job seekers? Are my users employers? How about current associate associates? How about our current clients? So all four of these audiences are going to be on your website, all with different user intent. A current associate may be thinking about time entry, or "I have a question for my recruiter." Can they figure out how to talk to you through your website? A current client may be looking for a very different kind of service experience by going to your website. As we're seeing more and more of, going to apps and platforms for communication, there's one more audience I want to forget: prospective internal hires. Most staffing companies right now are trying to hire, yet when I go to a lot of staffing company websites, I don't see much about their employment brand. I see their information for job seekers, but how about the information about working for their organization? Why would I choose them if I'm a recruiter or a salesperson, account executive, branch manager? Why would I choose that staffing company over a competitor? What's their vision for the future? What's their mission? Why will I be inspired by this company? That's all employment branding stuff that has to come out of your staffing website.
So going back to the four different kinds of user intent again, we've got the informational people who want to know what you do, how you work; they have questions themselves: how do I hire? How do I find a job? What's the process look like? They're learning, looking to acquire information. The navigational: maybe looking for a specific website: what's the best best staffing company near me? Or I'm trying to find a recruiter who has specific expertise, someone who knows my industry, my geography. If you're in IT staffing, maybe some specific technical product. If you look at the world of executive recruiters, and for those of you who are executive recruiters, typically that navigational intent is where you can win the SEO battle by being the best answer to people with a really specific navigational intent; they're looking for recruiters with very specific expertise. But even if you're a general commercial staffing firm, you've got clients, candidates, job seekers; they've got navigational intent, and you're trying to get them to find your website. On the commercial intent: people search for "What's the best staffing company? How do I work with a staffing firm? How do I enter my time?" They're looking, and commercially mentioned is to make a purchase decision, but they're looking to engage with your company or with someone in your industry or with just a recruiter in general, and they're asking questions to make that decision about where to go. Will they find your website? When they get to your website, will they trust you've got the answers? You're very credible; I get that you're the kind of organization I want to work with. Are they getting that brand? Are they getting that credibility? Are they getting that trustworthiness out of your content, out of the way your site is designed? Can they find the information quickly? And then lastly: where do I apply for a job? How do I request an employee? How do I get job alerts? You want to think about all the types of transactions that a job seeker or an employer might have with your business. We tend to think about staffing websites candidate-first, which makes sense; that's going to be the majority of your traffic, but mostly in terms of, "Oh, they're coming to my website to apply for a job." Well, some are, but that's the last step in the process. They're coming to you first because they want to see the kinds of jobs you have, the kinds of people you work with. A lot of people may go to a staffing company for the very first time; they don't even understand how you work. So your website: think about the intent of users based on not just their role but their experience with your business. An HR manager who's been in HR for 30 years and has worked with 100 staffing companies has a different user intent than someone that just moved into HR, just moved into talent acquisition. So as you're talking to your recruiters, talking to your sales people, find out who they're dealing with, what kinds of questions they're being asked during the sales process, during the recruiting process, because those questions are part of user intent; those are the things people will go to Google to search; those are the things people will want to find on your website. For each audience, you really want to understand their goals, and the chart I'm about to put up next is really just a starting point, so you know different reasons each of these audiences might come to your website, but by no means is this intended to be a complete list of possible user intents. So I just I did a little quick brainstorming for today's product demo to give you some ideas, because every one of the things that you see on screen right now could tie to content on your website, could tie to an interactive feature; it's a place a question, information that you want to make it easy for people to find. So regardless of the visitor and regardless of the visitor user intent, they can find what where they're looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
And for those people who just built a website, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a confession. So on my team, don't get upset with me, but we just launched a new website last spring; it didn't go as well as planned. We tried to do some things that were very unique, very creative, because we always like to be different with our website because it's part of what we do for a living. But when you try things that are different, they don't always work as planned. That's okay, because then we looked at the user experience based on how they're using the site. You'll see when we get to Google Analytics later how they're not using the site for us, and it led us to make some design changes, which were in the process of starting to implement, because we learned what worked and what didn't. And part of what you're doing in creating a great website is I don't want to look exactly like everybody else; I want to create some uniqueness to what I'm doing. You may try some experiments that help you stand out, but not every experiment is going to work, and that's okay, as long as you're looking at the data and then you're making changes. And the more you know about your clients and your candidates and the users on your website and why they come to you, the better you can be at understanding their goals, and that will drive content that will drive your calls to action throughout the website, because when you're driving people to get answers to their problems, they'll follow the path you're driving them on, and ultimately they're much more likely to then apply to a job or request talent from your business.
All right, next question: this one's been coming up a lot lately: what's the best platform for a staffing website? Should I use WordPress? Probably the most widely used content management platform on the planet, but not the only CMS; there's lots of other ones. Should I use website builders? You've probably seen commercials for Wix or Weebly, Squarespace; there's lots of other website builders. Should I use one of those? If you're a HubSpot automation, I can build my website through HubSpot; should I do that? And there's some proprietary platforms out there that are focused on building websites, some for staffing companies, some based on just being a proprietary content management platform. What's the right choice?
So in selecting the right platform for your website, there's some questions you want to ask: who owns the website? A lot of the website builders, if you actually read their use terms, you don't own the website; they do. The website builder does. You're paying them; you still owe the website, but you really don't have control. Is it a big risk? Probably not a big risk. Is it a risk? Yeah, if you change how you want your site managed, it's not yours; you're starting over. If you want to move the site, can you? If you're on WordPress, it's pretty easy to move. If you're on a proprietary platform, you can't move it; you're locked into that proprietary platform. So I'll tell you a story about that in just a minute, and one of the reasons we used to be on a proprietary platform and we're no longer. How easy is it to make changes? Different content management systems are easier; some are harder, related to making changes. How easy is it to control and manage SEO, search engine optimization, on your website? How reliable is the platform uptime? Are there any issues? Who does maintenance? What about security updates? We've all been seeing these horrible stories about cyber security threats. Who's maintaining the platform behind the scenes to make sure that it's safe? Big question, and this one we've we've seen what happens if my developer disappears. I've also seen ex issues: what happens if I have a battle with my developer? Can I get access to my site? So I've seen instances of companies, staffing companies, that had somebody built their website, and maybe it was an individual or a small firm, and they stopped doing website development work. Now nobody has access to the website, or the company they were working with was small and went out of business. Again, nobody has access to the website; they have to basically scrap it. And sometimes it's even worse: they can't get access to the DNS records, which is the address book of your website, to even tell the internet where to find your site. There are things we then have to do to try to hijack that DNS back; it's not a lot of fun. Can be done, but what you want to do is be protected. What happens if your website developer disappears? Am I on a platform that's easy to get someone else to help? Is there a cost to the platform? Some platforms are free; some come with a base monthly fee. Sometimes that base monthly fee can be very exorbitant. There are some proprietary platforms; I know we've talked to a couple larger staffing organizations that were on proprietary platforms that cost many thousands of dollars a month just for the platform; it doesn't include your website; that's just the base underlying architecture. And are there ability of third-party plug-ins to be purchased so that if I want to extend the capabilities, I don't have to build everything from scratch?
And because of this list, we made the decision to choose WordPress. It's open source, so there's no platform costs. 40 percent of all the websites on the planet are built on WordPress, so huge factor in terms of if I want to move the site, I can. If I want to access a massive network of developers, because WordPress can be hosted all over the place, sites are easily portable, so they can go from one hosting company to another. Now there's a number of hosting companies that are optimized for WordPress; you want one of those. We, when we host our client sites, use a company called WP Engine. You get the WP, WordPress; that's pretty much all they do. You also want to make sure, and then we did that, the platform is being updated, so the WordPress developer community is constantly updating WordPress to ensure security patches are put in, that it's new features are added, so that it's getting better and better and better without having to go rebuild your website because the base underlying platform's being improved. We also like WordPress because it's got fantastic SEO tools, and then we've got gone one step further and we use something called Elementor, which is a page builder, sort of like those website builders. So now someone who's not technical like me could easily edit a web page and do very advanced page layouts and add lots of fun bells and whistles. And anybody, any of you listening could jump into Elementor, and now do things that used to require a developer to do; now you can do it yourself. So for all these reasons, we said WordPress is it. It fits the rule of threes; that's something, one of our core values at Hilly Marketing. It's really good for our clients because they're not locked into us; if anything ever went wrong, if anything happened to us, anything happened to their site, they can move it; they own it. It's good for Hilly Marketing because it's good for our clients, and because WordPress, there isn't a big fee, and because the base system is being maintained, and it's good for our team because thanks to WordPress and Elementor, we can have web developers; we can have project managers; we get more people who can help our clients update their sites and our success team too, which means we can provide a higher level of service because the platform's easier for everyone. So WordPress for us really nailed it, hitting that rule of threes.
All right, in building a new website or even upgrading a site you just built, where do you start? And again, we're back to that question: is it the design? Is it copy? The functionality? Well, you can probably guess we're going to start with those audiences, and I'm going to ask you to start the audiences in two different ways. One is to find all the different audiences coming to your website, and I showed you five different audiences before, but you might break that down even further. You may have an HR audience on the client side and an end-user audience. You may have different industries you target because of the kinds of staffing you do, and you may have very different types of buyers, but you want to think about all those audiences and what's their potential user intent, and maybe it's the same what an audience to the next, but maybe there's different audiences with different user intent. But you also want to think about your own goals: why does the website exist? Is it there to be a brochure? I hope that's not all it is. Is it there to facilitate the service process? Is it really there to act like a digital branch office? And I use that term at the beginning not lightly. And this goes back to a client, this is probably six, seven years ago, who swore that, you know, their website really wasn't that important, that all their candidates called them or came into the office when they needed something. And we said, "Do you mind if we take a look at your Google Analytics?" They said, "No, that's absolutely fine; go ahead, take a look." And we did, and we said, "Take a guess as to how many people were on your website in the last 12 months." And I don't remember the exact number they guessed, but it wasn't a very high number, and when we told them that they had had 600,000 people visit their website, you could hear a pin drop; they were stunned. But they were getting orders of magnitude more visitors to their website than they were getting to any of their branch offices or to all of their branch offices. They didn't really think about, "All of these people are engaging with them on the web," so how do they set goals to capture more of those people? And probably for everybody listening right now, you've got way more traffic hitting your website than people applying to your jobs and people contacting you for staffing services. So what are your goals with those people? Is the goal just to only get them to contact you if they want to apply to job? Is the goal to move them down the sales funnel? Is the goal to constantly re-engage them? Is the goal to build trust? Is the goal to demonstrate your credibility? Is the goal to prove your value? Is the goal to get people to take certain actions? What actions? You want to define all this stuff, and setting up your website, once the goals are defined, you can then figure out the functionality, and that ties that user intent in. I need to have functionality that matches user intent. People want information; I need a blog; I need white papers; I need videos; I need something that provides that information. If they're looking to take action, I need to have functionality that makes it easy for them to take action, whether it's apply to a job, request an employee, opt in for a job alert, sign up for a newsletter, read a piece of content. How do I make that functionality work as best I can? The next level is called information architecture, which is a fancy techie way of saying we got to figure out where to put stuff so it's easy to get to. How do we lay out the page structure? How do we lay out the individual pages? How do we design the navigation so that a user, regardless of who they are and what their intent is, can find what they're looking for as easily as possible? How do we use calls to action? How do we use maybe something in a sidebar or a drop-down or fly-in or a pop-up? How do we architect the information to make it easier for our users to get value out of our websites? Then we can get into design: what's the site going to look like? This is the fun part of the process, but you don't want to start with design; you want to really start with what are we trying to accomplish. Design and architecture go hand in hand, because a lot of the architecture elements, things like the way the nav looks, and are we designing for mobile? We design for desktop; is it mobile-first? We have to think about all of these things in the design process, and a good web designer is thinking about how do I take advantage of the latest technologies to make it easy to engage with the content? How do I design so that is really responsive, so that when switches from desktop to mobile, that the user experience is as good on mobile as it is on desktop and vice versa? I see a lot of companies that will do mobile-first; they design something great for mobile; they just bring it back to desktop, but they don't add the extra capabilities that you have on a desktop to make the site better. And then finally we get to copy: copy meaning what are going to be the calls to action that should drive the copy? What's the SEO? Has someone done the homework to figure out what we need to include? More on that in just a minute. And are we telling the story? Do we know the story we want to tell? What's the right message to each of those user audiences? How do we—it's not just about differentiation; it's about differentiation to each audience. So your company has a story that's based on the kinds of problems you can solve and value you can provide. What's the most compelling way to tell that story? And then integrate that storytelling with the design and the calls to action and incorporate the SEO and not make it sound like it was written for a machine; that's what a good copywriter does is to tie all those things together.
So when we build websites, what makes our process different? Well, as a starting point, we have three types of sites; it's really not one-size-fits-all. We have value, starter, and custom sites, so we can have different price points and different service process to really fit companies with different goals and different budgets. There's not one right answer for all. The value sites are most templated sites, and a lot of times they're used by small companies, startups; they're used
By existing companies, they may want to test a new idea, or they have a separate division that has to have a small site, and they want something done quick and fast. Value sites perfect in the middle are our starter sites. We have a nice library of designs that make it easier to make design decisions, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. But then we adapt that design to each client, so it makes it uniquely theirs. When we're done, we can change the way that information is architected, the navigation, all of the features used to drive people to content, the functionality to make that end product really unique to the customer. But not having to start from scratch saves a lot of money.
Then lastly, we have some clients like, "No, I really want everything original created for me. Let's start with a blank sheet. Let's do wireframes. Let's figure out how to create those goals and that information architecture, and then the entire motif design exactly around my business." And we're happy to work with clients however they want to work, but we have different models which most companies don't have. We have something called the ABC process, and we kind of get the idea from the acronym; we just try to make it really simple to go through the process of creating a website. We know you have staffing companies to run, you have people to recruit, job orders to fill, clients to talk to; building a website is not how you're spending a lot of your time. So our process is designed to make it as easy as possible for our clients, with giving our clients a strong voice in the input but minimizing the amount of touches that the clients have to have, and working on the exact right to see in that ABC is right core messaging that comes through on that website.
Our dedicated project managers—I know this is a challenge for people in my line of work when you have companies that do websites—is who manages the project? Do we have a creative person do it? A lot of times clients like that because that can be the fastest response, but having someone who is a professional project manager tends to result in a better outcome because you get better advice along the way; you get someone who's dedicated to facilitating the process, and the creatives focus their time on what they do best: creating. Then behind the scenes, probably one of the biggest differences is we have a really big team. I'm really proud to say that we're now up to 61 people, and that includes specialists in web design, web copy, search engine optimization, and build-out. So when it comes to building a website, it's not one person; it is a team working with you, with experts in all these areas to help our clients get exactly what they want in terms of accomplishing their goals.
And then after the site's built, um, we have an amazing success team, a dedicated team that is there to answer questions, provide training; they have a support center; they help me—Hailey—where we have release notes and we have product training. We have lots of information to help our clients use our websites. And then when we do hosting also, we take care of the back-end updating of WordPress, and there's updates to all of our technology products, like our career portal software, that are included with the ongoing support that we provide and the fees that people pay to us. And there's a lot of unique functionality that we can provide for your website. So a lot of you, you know, may know, some of you are probably using our career portal software, where we're constantly adding new features to make it a better experience for people looking to apply to a job and better distribution to help get your jobs in front of more people. Our most recent addition was making sure that all the jobs go from the career portal to Facebook Jobs, and our new application management system makes it easy to ensure that a follow-up touch is made with everybody, whether they're somebody you want to hire, somebody you don't want to hire; we just don't leave anybody hanging.
Our WordPress plug-in suite—because WordPress has the ability to create plugins—we made a bunch of our own that we bundled together into a suite of a lot of functionality that we found staffing companies commonly want to make their websites perform better: things like managing testimonials and case studies, having the ability to type calls to action to blog posts, making it easier to manage team profiles on your website, so that you can easily keep your site up to date with the latest testimonials, case studies, team information without having to call your developer every single time there's a change to your organization. Our talent showcase software—it's a very simple way to do skill marketing via your website. For those people who use our content services, whether it's blog writing or HaileyMail service, we can integrate all that content, particularly on the HaileyMail site; we can try to integrate entire content libraries directly into your website. And we've got some new stuff coming out for 2022 where we can even pull in dynamic content off the web to help integrate your website. We have our chatbot software; we'll have more on that in just a minute. And we have IP tracking, which allows you to see who's visiting the website, so you can figure out what kinds of companies are on our site, and are they companies that are sales teams calling on, or maybe they should be calling on, because they're the organizations checking you out. And lastly, we have our ROI dashboards, our unique product to show you the performance of your website. I'll have more on that in just a little bit.
But what about your ATS? How about integrating that with your website? The sub headlines here—that's a loaded question. Some ATSs can play really nicely with your website; other ATSs don't offer quite as much. We're sort of restricted to what we can do with your website based on what the ATS provides. But some best practices for ATS integration is go back to thinking about it as your digital branch office. What's the user intent of your existing clients, of your existing temporary associates, of candidates? So are there client and employee portals that can be integrated throughout your website? Is it easy to find where I can go do time entry and time approval? Do you have any sort of process for video interviewing? All of these things can be done so that an individual can interact with your staffing company remotely over the internet through your website just as well as if they were talking to you or meeting face to face. With the career portal itself, you want an easy way to get jobs from your ATS to your website; you want them distributed to third parties; you want to make it super easy to apply, and ideally do initial screening and then get that data back into your ATS, while also re-engaging talents who might not have applied or might want to apply to additional jobs. And then lastly, the talent showcase: can we integrate the ATS with talent from the ATS to automate that building of a talent profile, so your clients and prospective clients can search for candidates who are available? So some ATSs allow that last piece; not all do.
In the career portal that we have, the integration looks like this: so the ATS goes to the career site; the candidates can search and apply and opt in for job alerts; the career site then takes your jobs, sends it out to job aggregators, optimizes it for Google for Jobs, send it to Facebook Jobs. We also integrate with Appcast to do programmatic, so we can manage job advertising spend very accurately. It leads to a very simple apply process; we can use a short form that's built into our career portal; we can also use Apply with Indeed, Apply with Facebook, and then get the data back into the ATS. That's what you really want from ATS integration: get the information you need out of the ATS to your website, allow people to interact with it either on your website or, in the case of jobs, on other websites, and then pull the data back in and back into your ATS. Bullhorn works really well for us; we're making a lot of ground with Avionté on what they can do. Not every ATS allows this full cycle, but those that do, it makes the best possible search and apply process for your company and for your candidates.
Besides the ATS integration, there's other integrations to consider: reputation management, your brand, what you're known for, your reviews are becoming more important than ever, and pulling them into your website, whether that's through the services you might have—rep management with Hailey Marketing—or using a company like Great Recruiters, you're using ClearlyRated; we want to pull that into the website; we want to pull those good reviews in because that is one of the best credibility builders you can have. So if you're not feeding in your four and five-star reviews today, that is something you want to absolutely look at going forward. If you're not doing proactive reputation management in today's environment where candidates—you know, we're talking about the Great Resignation—candidates are looking for new employment, you need to be seen as a highly rated employer. How about referrals? We just had somebody on our Secrets of Staffing Success podcast who said that their—their referral network is far and away their number one source of talent, way greater than job advertising on Indeed, and they do it because they work really hard to build community with talent in their marketplace, and then they have great tools to encourage referrals. And you know, whether you're using, again, our referral manager that's integrated with the career portal, using a company like Staffing Referrals, you want to think about how can I make the referral process easy for people and tightly integrated with individual jobs and other sections of your website.
And how about if you've got distributed team members? A lot of people may be working remotely or in remote branch offices. So do we need to have something behind the scenes—an intranet—that can be a separate site? It can just be hidden pages that are secure behind a login, providing important information that team members need. Hailey Marketing—we've got a couple of hidden page intranet sites that we use for a lot of our sales collateral and our branding guidelines and things that our team needs that we don't want to make public, but putting it on our SharePoint network also wasn't the easiest way to share it with the team. The internet pages were all right.
Let's talk about chatbots and automation. So if you've been in any staffing conference in the last two years, you've probably heard Sense or HereFish; you may have heard HubSpot or ActiveCampaign; there's just a lot going on in the world of chatbots and automation. So why do people put bots on a staffing website? This first answer is it's 24/7 user—talent primarily—engagement. You can't be—while you can—but you probably don't want to be in the office 24 hours a day. So a bot makes it easy for people to interact with you; you can make sure that you don't lose people coming to the site who expected to be able to converse with you in some manner right then and there. And if you're under 30 years old, there's been some studies that say the odds are you prefer dealing with a bot—a computer-assisted chat—than actually talking to a human. "I'd rather text; I'd rather use messaging." Not me; I'm older than that, uh, then pick up the phone. But that's how a lot of your candidates are engaging with the world. So if you don't have some sort of a bot, you are losing placeable candidates.
How about automation? Why do we do that? Well, this is really about improving the service experience and ensuring consistency. It's about eliminating that black hole that people feel like you didn't get in touch with them; they—there was nobody there to follow up, to let them know where things stand; there's nobody showing that they cared. And we look at creating top-of-the-funnel campaigns and mid-funnel, and that's marketing speak, but in plain English what that means is when somebody comes to your website and they engage with a piece of interesting content—a video, uh, ebook, a blog post—if we can capture their information, they're at the top of the funnel—the funnel—they're just interested in content, but now we can automate following up. And this is where HubSpot and ActiveCampaign come into play, and I think Sense and HereFish are heading in this direction and not quite there on all of this yet with the website integration, but we can use these tools to automate communication flows to then follow up based on what that pers—piece of content that person interacted with, to effectively continue the conversation, add value, strengthen your positioning, and bring them back to the site again and again. The mid-funnel campaign is when somebody's already expressing interest—maybe interest in a job, maybe interest in your services—and now we can have an automation—again, a series of communications—emails, texts—that reinforce your value, that teach people about how to work with you, that teach people why you're an amazing staffing company, that share testimonials, that teach people or answer their frequently asked questions, and that are constantly bringing people back to your website to apply to a job or to contact you about hiring.
In terms of automation, there's—we can help you with several bot options. We have a scripted bot; you can see a picture on the screen, and scripted bot means you essentially define the inputs and the outputs. So I'm going to have the bot ask questions based on the answer the person provides; I'll go to the next question, and we use that to gather information. These bots are great because they're inexpensive and they're effective at getting more people to respond to your website. Moving up, there are third-party bots—Sense, Olivia Staffing Engine—that have bots that are more based on artificial intelligence. These can have more engaged conversations with people than a scripted bot; they can—they don't have to just follow the script; um, they tend to be a higher-quality service experience; some of them can actually put what they learn back into your ATS, which helps with data entry; they also tend to be dramatically more expensive than a scripted bot. And then automation: how can you build out those automations? So if you haven't yet met Jeff Stotts, our new CMO—I guess Jeff, I can't say new anymore; it's been six months—uh, but he's been helping a lot of company audit what they're doing with Sense and HereFish to really look at what's working, what's not working, and then where needed to provide ongoing optimization. We also have experience with both HubSpot and ActiveCampaign if people want to figure out how do we use these tools better, how do we do more integrating the content in our website with the automation to do that top-of-the-funnel and mid-funnel follow-up.
All right, I mentioned it earlier: what about search engine optimization? How do we help you get found more? So the big thing to know here is that SEO has changed, and we still see most people focused on—I'm trying to rank as being number one for best staffing agency near me or best staffing agency in town—and there's nothing wrong with that, although I'm about to cross it out; that's not the only strategy; it's not just about keywords. So we have to go back to that user intent: what are they searching for? The navigational searchers: what do they want to find? The informational searchers: what questions are they asking? We need to create content that matches that intent. Then we need to create content and more content and more content because Google rewards websites that create lots of content, that create content that is relevant. So you want to make sure your jobs are optimized and Google knows about them; you want to be producing blogs that Google knows about; you want to be asking the questions people are actually answering—the questions people are asking. This is about creating more pages—in specialized pages, location pages, getting very creative pages that are very specific about individual things that you do, because the more specific the content is to questions people are asking or information they're seeking, the more likely is that specific page is going to rank. And you have to think about some security and core vitals: Emma, do I have a secure site? Is it a fast site? Does it interact well on desktop and mobile? It's really techy stuff here that I'm not going to get into, but our SEO and web developers can get into if you've got questions. But we need to make sure the performance of our site is as good as it can be. And we also want to think about where traffic sources are coming from because search engine optimization isn't just about search engines; it's also about just getting people to your website, whether it's from direct traffic, email, social media. But then once people come to your website, do they stick around? Are we keeping people there? Are we re-engaging them? Are we getting them from one page to another, or do you have a lot of visitors who are hitting your website and bouncing away? Because if you have a high bounce rate, that's going to negatively impact your SEO. So we want to have that great candidate experience, that great client experience that keeps people on your site longer.
So how do we figure all this out? So the—the process that we use for SEO is start with an audit: where is your site today? Then we want to do a deep keyword analysis, really looking at what words are ranking, what words are really competitive, where do you have an opportunity to make improvements, where should we not spend too much time because we're unlikely to be successful? We look at your competitors: what are they doing? What are they ranking for? All this data is available; we can actually see everything that's working for your competition and build an SEO strategy around that keyword analysis and competitive review. And the strategies can help us figure out which keywords and keyword phrases should we target. Keywords don't matter—it's not—they're not unimportant, as you may have thought from my last slide; they still are important, but we also want to look at local optimization and then creating long-form content, and we call pillar content the long-form content; we can break into lots of smaller pieces that answer questions for people. We want to look for those featured snippets and how you optimize, so that's those kinds of responses that you see on Google, whether it's an answer to a question without ever visiting a website; there's a way you can write content and code for those. You want to know more about SEO? This today's presentation is not on SEO; it's on websites, but go to haleymarketing.com, check out the resources, and go to our ebooks and guides, and you can download our SEO strategies for 2021 that covers all of this stuff in a lot more detail.
All right, it's time to get nerdy: how do you really know if a website's working? So for the—the visitor on today's demo that just built a website, this is some stuff you're going to want to look at. So understanding your website performance, you're going to start with Google Analytics, and if you're not an analytics user, there's some simple things you can look at: no traffic sources and trends; how much traffic are we getting, and how does—how is it changed over the last three months, six months, year? How does year-over-year compare? A lot of times you may want to compare the same time of year this year versus the previous year. So, for example, let's say you're a light industrial staffing, and you typically see a big peak in job orders and applies in Q4, well then I want to compare Q4 this year versus Q4 last year as opposed to Q4 this year versus Q3 this year because those are very different time periods. I want to look at where people coming into my website and where they're leaving because I can learn a lot about how they're finding us based on the entry page, and then I can look at where they're leaving and see what can I do on those pages to make them perform better, so people don't leave without taking the next step, which is applying to a job or contacting you or completing a call to action. I can look at dwell time, meaning how long are they staying on the website, and how—how many people are only hitting one page and bouncing away? If people are leaving too quickly, I can set a goal like how do we make a 10 or 20 or 50 improvement in session time, keeping people there longer. Can we recommend related content? Can we bring up videos for people to watch? Can we do things to make the web experience more engaging so that people stay on the site longer? Can we have better calls to action? Then you can set goals in analytics that can—conversion rate optimization—that's CRO—can I try to optimize how people are converting—the people are getting to my website are making it to a conversion page, and I can actually monitor what percentage of people, based on how they're coming in, get to the goal. I can look at those goals every single month or more often to see are we making improvements in conversions, and I can start to tweak content, tweak copy, tweak page layouts, tweak design elements to try to improve that response.
Now, if you're more geeky and you have the ability to access some more advanced tools, there's also Google Search Console, and then we use a couple of tools—SEMrush and SE Ranking. Search Console allows you to see search visibility trends, keyword rankings, search result click-through rates, so you can see based on what others are doing and how people are engaging with keywords to develop your own SEO strategies. It gives you the ability to identify kind of the quote-unquote low-hanging fruit pages where maybe you're not ranking that well, but with some relatively minor changes you could rank much higher. With the SE Ranking and SEMrush, this is where we do our deep SEO research and reporting; these are paid platforms; we can look at your current site and your current keyword performance; we can do the competitive benchmarking here, and we can figure out the exact content and ranking strategies using these tools. Now we know that not everybody wants to jump in and learn Google Analytics; that's why Hailey Marketing exists. So we try to make basic analytics easier for our clients, and behind our websites we build ROI dashboards; they'll show you your website performance; they'll show you your SEO; they'll show you your career portal performance, so that anytime you want to jump in behind the scenes you can actually look at traffic to your website, people completing forms, where traffic is coming from, keywords that are ranking, how your jobs are doing, which jobs are doing well, where your candidates are coming from, what application methods they're using; these are all in our ROA dashboard. So somebody with no technical expertise, no knowledge of Google Analytics, can just at a glance look and see how are we doing, how's our website, how's our SEO, how are our jobs performing? For clients for whom we're providing ongoing SEO and pay-per-click advertising services, there we do regular reporting—monthly performance updates and quarterly strategy reevaluation—to help companies really analyze the data to go make websites that perform better, websites that go beyond being a brochure to really being that digital branch office.
All right, last question: this is one to ask yourself, and this is rhetorical; I mean you're welcome to put it into the Q&A, but is it time for a new website? How do you know? So a typical website has a lifespan of usually between three and five years; technology changes a lot; your business changes a lot; design trends change a lot. So some questions to ask to know if it's time for a new website: does the site you have match the user intent for the various audience are coming to visit you? If not, it may be time for a new site, at least for a change in content or navigation. Does the design match your brand? I've seen this very often where a company has a brand that's really exceptional, yet you go to their website and it's five, six years old, and it's really average or worse—behind the times. And if your website doesn't match your brand, since every client and every candidate is visiting your website before meeting with you, before applying to a job, now you've created some distrust because what you signal with the look of your website doesn't match what the ex—what you've been saying in selling and recruiting. Does your content tell the right story? Are you actually accurately conveying your value, the problems you solve, you showing the audience why you work with people like them? Are you making them feel comfortable about you? Is the information up to date? Does it even describe your services accurately, or has your business changed but your website hasn't kept up? Are you losing too many candidates? Go look at those exit pages and bounce rates and see how many people are not making it to applying to.
A job you're probably losing dozens, maybe even hundreds of candidates visiting your website each and every day. And if you're like almost every—not just staffing company—every company in America right now, you're struggling to fill every job order. So we can't afford to lose candidates; we have to do more to engage and then re-engage candidates using the tools that we've talked about today.
What about SEO? Is it well optimized? Is your career portal optimized for Google for Jobs? Maybe you don't even know; it's something to take a look at. And then, do you have the right calls to action and enough calls to action? There's just some things to look at. If your website is failing in these areas, it may be time for some minor tweaks to copy, layout, navigation, or it may be time to update the site.
If you're not sure, we'll be happy to take a look for you. Just reach out; we can provide a detailed review, tell you what's working, share ideas for improvement. You can reach out to us to get a review of your website. Just reach out at 888-696-2900 or info@haleymarketing.com. We'll be happy to take a look at your site and share our thoughts as to where there are opportunities for improvement.
And if you happen to be in the market for a new website this month or next month, we actually have a special promotion going on. Some of you may have just received an email that if you act now, we're actually going to give you a free chatbot for six months on your website. So you can learn more about this special offer at haleymarketing.com/25deals. This is the final one of our 25th birthday celebration deals.
And uh, speaking of our 25th birthday celebration, one more thing to share: if you attended our Smart Ideas Summit back in August, or if you missed them, we had 14 amazing sessions over seven hours with some of the industry's leading consultants on just about every area of staffing, sales, recruiting, operations, plus a lot of good marketing tips. And all the recordings are now available on demand at haleymarketing.com/25bash. So 25deals is the website special offer; 25bash will get you all of our recordings.
All right, just want to say thank you to everyone for being part of today's product demo webinar. I hope you found the information valuable. Also coming up, we've got a couple of additional events that I hope you'll join us for. On November 4th, Brad Bailey and our team is going to be presenting Rockstar Marketing. I've had the privilege of seeing him do this live; it's an amazing presentation on the value of social media and how to take lessons from sports and entertainment and apply them to the staffing industry. And then our product demo next month will be all about reputation management, which I mentioned earlier today is becoming so critical to employment brand, and this will talk to you about how to really take charge of your employment brand. So from everybody here at Haley Marketing Group, thank you so much for being part of today's product demo webinar.