STAFFING WEBSITES: How to DOUBLE the Performance of Your Site

Good afternoon, everyone. This is David Cerns with Hailey Marketing, and welcome to today's Lunch with Haley webinar.

So today, we're gonna have a lot of fun. We're gonna take a look at a topic that's one of my favorites of all the things that we do at Hailey Marketing, and we're gonna look at staffing websites. And as our title says, we're specifically gonna be looking at ways to double the performance of your site. And by "double the performance," what do we mean? We mean getting more people to take action. We're going to look at some of the challenges going on with websites, and we're going to get into a lot of specific details.

I'm sure the question will pop up, "Can we get the slides?" because there's a lot of content in the slides today. So yes, they will be available. If you have not used our lunchwithhaley.com website to get access to our on-demand webinars, you can check that out. This event should be recorded and at lunchwithhaley.com on the webinars on-demand section by tomorrow. All right, but let's jump in today.

So, Houston, we have a problem. There's uh 21,000 staffing companies in the United States, lots more globally, and we're building really good-looking sites, by and large. But while we're looking better, when it comes to response, the sites aren't necessarily performing better. So what's going on? You know, what's the problem? Why aren't we seeing off-the-chart numbers of people applying to jobs?

Well, a lot of emphasis in website design—I've been guilty of this, I know a lot of our clients have been guilty of this, and lots of people who are not our clients have been guilty of this—is creating just beautiful websites that don't actually sell anything. This is not just a brochure; this is part of your sales process. Now your website has to facilitate the sale moving forward to make life easier for your sales people and recruiters.

My personal favorite—and these are getting better, but we're still not where we need to be—it's career portals that kill job applications; long application forms, complex forms. We still have some staffing websites that have applied forms that require a social security number—a bad application form—and we've seen the data: it will kill as many as 95 percent of the people who go to apply to a job, abandon the application process. You think about what you're spending on Indeed, on Zip Recruiters; you think you're—what you're spending on recruiting talent to drive people to your website to go fill out an application, and you're losing dozens, thousands, tens of thousands—for some companies, hundreds of thousands—of people who were about to apply to a job and stopped because of the application process. All right.

We have navigation that lacks clarity. So I put up the world's most generic navigation here: Clients, Candidates, About, Blog, Company. Except that's also the navigation that's on lots of staffing websites. We're going to look at some examples later of how to rethink even simple things like navigation to be more clear. And I'll do a mea culpa here because this is one of the ones, as a copywriter, that I have often focused on how to simplify navigation down to single words, but then been guilty of doing things that may make sense to me, may make sense to our client, but to the job seeker coming to your website, to the employer who's not that familiar with staffing services, they may not understand what to do because of that lack of clarity or the use of industry jargon.

In navigation, messaging that doesn't drive action—seen this on lots of websites—and if you read about the topic we're talking about today, conversion rate optimization, you're going to see that the number one knock on all websites, not just staffing websites, is they tend to be very "me" focused—"me" being about my company. I want to tell you why we're great and all the things we can do for you and who we are, but we're not really telling you about the problems we solve; we're not driving the actions that need to be taken next. So we have messaging that doesn't convey value; we have messaging that doesn't make it really easy to understand how and why to respond; we have messaging that doesn't walk people through the process. On a lot of websites in our industry, we focus on too few outcomes. Sometimes it's simple as the only thing somebody could do is the contact us button, fill out a form, maybe call a basement number on a contact page or a location page. But as you're going to see in a few minutes, there's lots of other ways we could drive response if we really think through something called conversion paths and all of the different things, different types of visitors might want to do on your website.

Going a little technical here, sometimes we get beautiful design and lousy performance. This has been something that Google has made much more prevalent with this thing called Core Web Vitals. We are not getting geeky at all today; however, the one geeky thing I'll say is you have to be looking under the hood at how fast your site is loading and how long it is till people can take action and how much content moves around, particularly when people are using it on a mobile device. You can actually get scores for these things, and you're trying to make your site technically perform better; it's a big deal for SEO, and that's what Google Core Web Vitals are most often associated with, but it's an even bigger deal for users who don't get a good response.

Now, before I move on, I just had a question: Have we started yet? I see slides but no audio. Is anybody else having audio issues? Or I should say, if you're not having audio issues, just put me in the question box, let me know you can hear. [Music] I can hear. All right, thank you very much for the response. We know we're—we're good in that case. We will move on, and um, I don't know if anybody else is logged in as administrator—Joanne, hopefully get the sound can be resolved for you soon. All right, for everybody else, let's jump back in and let's talk about what to do about this and what the implication is.

So when you have a website that's got these issues overall, we get to a problem with a lack of ways to take action, and you end up with frustrated users. And when someone is frustrated, what happens? Do they work their way through your website? No, unfortunately. If you add it all up, when we look under the hood at Google Analytics and most websites for when companies come to us, we're seeing 50 to 60 percent bounce rates. Now what does that mean? It means somebody came to your website and before they went anywhere else, before they took any action, they bounced away from the page they visited; they came and they left. And that's leaving thousands of candidates hanging who didn't apply to a job, dozens or hundreds of employers who may have needed staffing help not contacting you. And so what we're going to talk about for roughly the next uh 45 minutes is how do you fix this problem.

So I mentioned that this real subject of today's presentation is something called conversion rate optimization, or CRO. So let me give you a quick introduction to what CRO is all about. So CRO, the definition is: it's the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. The simple math is: you take the number of people who did something, divided by the number of people who visited your website, and you multiplied by 100 because nobody likes decimals. So we're really trying to see what percentage of people coming to your website are taking the actions you want them to take. That might mean they applied for a job; it might mean they submitted a contact us form; they may have requested an employee; they may have clicked a button to call your office; they may have signed up for a newsletter; even clicking on a link might be a desired action. And CRO is the process of getting people to do that. When it's really all about it's thinking about what's going to drive people to our website, what's going to make them stop in the right places, what's going to persuade them to take action, how do we give people the best possible user experience? Because if we do that, that's what makes them want to convert.

And when thinking about CRO, we're going to think about drivers, hooks, and barriers. So drivers are the things that bring people to your website. We're going to talk more about all three of these in just a second. Hooks are the things you're offering to get people to take an action. And I would say for most staffing websites, we underestimate or we under-plan for the different kind of hooks that would drive action. And barriers are all the things that we didn't mean to throw in people's way, but that caused them not to respond. This is where we have a huge opportunity to re-engineer our websites to remove those barriers, create a more seamless user experience. You know, the best of all worlds is thinking about Amazon: one click, and I can buy it. Okay, we want to make as our websites as much as possible, people are getting to what they want and being able to take the actions they want and we want them to take as quickly and easily as possible.

So let's start with drivers. Before you can make any edits to your website, you have to think about who's really coming to your website. And typically we think about job seekers and employers, and we'll ask clients in the process of designing a website, "What's the mix like? How do you—how do you think about your website? Is it mostly focused on the job seeker? Is it a 50/50 split? Is it somewhere in the middle?" And every staffing website is typically somewhere in the middle. We have some executive recruiting firms who are 100 percent employer-focused; we have some staffing companies that are 100 percent job-seeker focused, especially what's been going on in the market the last few years. But the majority is some sort of a mix. But you have people coming to your website who may or may not know a lot about how you operate, who may or may not know a lot about your company. So we need to think about those people who are coming to you or who are not familiar with your business and may or may not be familiar with staffing as a whole.

Then you've got current associates—people working for you—come to your website all the time. It may be to enter a time card; it may be to get information on a local office; maybe to log into your ATS. But they're coming to your website, and when they're coming, what objectives do they have? What are they trying to do? And how do they get where they need to go as quickly and easily as possible? Same with your current clients; they're coming to your website. Now, there may not be coming your website to learn about your services like a new employer would, but they may be coming to your website to facilitate the service process; they may be coming because they need information on a local office, they forgot the phone number; they may be coming because they also want to get inside the ATS to run reports or to see the status of a job order you're working on.

Then there's people we almost never think of: partners to your business or vendors. They may be coming to your website and looking for information to figure out how to best work with you or to remind themselves about what you do and help their sales people, their service people do a better job in providing service to you. And one that's been really critical to the industry in the last couple of years is candidates for internal jobs. Because we're already in an industry with a lot of turnover, and it's been worse in the last two years—I don't have to tell you all that—but we need to make sure that our websites are really providing a great employment brand, conveying our brand to people who might want to work for us as recruiters, as sales people, as account executives, in operations, in leadership positions. And all in all, you think about you've got this network of people coming to your website, all with a different intent, a different need, and they're trying to get to different places. Our challenge in thinking through a website is not to think of it like a brochure—we're going to start with the front cover and go to the end—but all the different ways someone's going to want to engage with your site, how they're going to get to your site, and where they're going to want to go.

Now, in the marketing world, this is where personas come into play, where you think about all these audiences and you start to divide it out to: who are these people, and why are they on our—our website? What are they looking to do? So you wanna—once you know who's coming, there—this is the next thing is: why are they coming there? What is bringing people to the website? And when I pose the question here, "What brings people to your site?", don't think about things like, "Well, they're coming from social media; they're coming from an email; they're coming from Google search." I want you to think about the reasons why they're coming to your site. Do they want help with something? They want help getting a job? They want help hiring? Do they have a question about how to hire or the job hunting process, employment or HR issues, how staffing or recruiting works, or just what your company is all about because they're very familiar with staffing but they're not as familiar with you? Or maybe they have questions about the people who work in your organization; they want to meet that recruiter who just called on them; they want to see more about that sales person and get some credibility builders from your website. Maybe they were referred to you—so many of your good candidates come from referrals—but before those referrals pick up the phone, they're going to your website; they were told to check you out. But then are they going to find the information they seek to corroborate the referral and verify, "Should I contact this staffing company?"

We need to think about all these drivers, and really what's critical is to think about the fact they're coming to you with questions in their mind; they want answers. But do you know the questions? On our webinar series in the past, I've mentioned a book called *They Ask, You Answer* by Marcus Sheridan. If you've never read it, I highly recommend it. Again, it's *They Ask, You Answer*. It's sort of a playbook for how to write content for search engine optimization, but really what the book is about is getting deep inside the minds of all of these different audiences that are going to come to your website, understanding how they think, understanding how they act, understanding what they want, and then making sure you're answering the questions, you're providing the essential information through your web pages.

Now, an easy way to do this is talk to your sales people and recruiters and have them compile a list, set up a OneNote they can all share into, write down the questions candidates are asking throughout the job search process, from the time they're scheduling their first interview till the time they're wrapping up their first assignment, to the time you redeploy them: what questions are they asking? Keep a list of them. Same thing on the client side. The more you know the questions that are being asked of your sales people and your recruiters, the more you can use your website to answer these questions, because those people aren't just asking the questions of your sales people and recruiters; they're also searching the internet for those answers, and they want to find the answers on your website.

Hooks. Hooks are about getting people to take action. So solving a problem can be as simple as a blog post that answers a question, can be a service that you provide that solves a problem. Where do they go to get answers to questions? Now, some websites have a frequently asked questions section. I'm not saying you need one. Most good blogs are structured in a way that the blog section answers questions; it's broken down into logical categories that help people get answers to their questions. Some of you have very deep resource centers with categorized content to help people find answers to their questions. Some people you may use a chatbot or live chat to give people instant ways to get questions answered. People will take action when you offer them something of value. Certainly, a job is something of value, but the opportunity to talk to a recruiter, the opportunity to uh download a piece of content. And on the next slide, I've got some specific ideas for you, but you can brainstorm with your team: "What would bring tons of value to our clients? What would really help the people we're trying to place, people we're trying to attract to our jobs? What information, what services would help these people?" If we can offer them something of value, they'll take action. What we're talking about here is a CTA, or call to action. And the first set of notes in this presentation, I talked about the problem is there's just not that many different kinds of CTAs on staffing websites, but there's tons of things you could have, from watching videos to learning more about information to scheduling an appointment to reading to clicking to get something. The graphic here is just intended to stimulate thinking, but there's so many different ways to have calls to action.

So a few specific ideas for everybody listening today: Obviously, the ability to search jobs—that takes people deeper into your website. I come to the homepage; I'm at—I'm reading a blog post, and I can search your jobs; that takes me deeper into your site. I don't have to search; I can apply right away. Most of you have some sort of "Apply Now" button front and center on your website. If you don't, this is what a lot of people are looking to do: I just want to apply, and you figure out the job that's right for me because you're the staffing expert. How about getting a job agent? How many of you have career portals that allow candidates to opt in for job alerts, but you're sort of only burying that deep into your career portal; you're not making that a feature of your website like, "Get a Job Agent," so every time we post something that matches your interests, you'll be the first to know. If you're a job seeker and you're working with a staffing company that promises to help you throughout your career, you want that agent from that staffing company. Requesting an employee: Is there a really simple way for me to ask for help filling an open role, easier than having to pick up the phone and call a recruiter? How about just simply being able to read about a topic? This is where blogs come in. We had somebody about two weeks ago that I was talking to who said, "Yeah, I really don't get the value of a blog; I think it's kind of a waste of time." And my reply was, "Well, people are coming to your website looking for answers to questions. A blog is a place that makes it super easy for you to gather these questions and answer these questions and then seed key blog topics, blog posts, and other pages in your website to drive people deep into your website so they—you build trust, you build credibility as you're helping people get answers to their questions." Then there's downloads—taking a blog post to another level. We can give people an ebook, a white paper; we can allow them to watch a webinar, just like you are right now. So this is another way to get people to convert from your website is offering them deeper, richer content. How about a free service? Maybe you do a resume review—a lot of your candidates you probably will set up resumes for them—maybe you can—there's other ways you can consult with an employer on their hiring process or reviewing a job profile or maybe even a job post for a job you're not even filling, but to offer something of value to help the employer be more successful gives them a reason to take action, gives them a reason to start to engage with your company. And then there's "Sign up for"—and you'll see I said not a newsletter. So many of you have a box somewhere on your website that says, "Get our newsletter." I don't know about you, but my inbox is filled minute by minute with new email coming in; I don't want a newsletter, but that doesn't mean I don't want email from companies; it means I want somebody who's giving me some sort of publication that solves a specific problem. So if you've got a generic "Sign up for our newsletter," as soon as we get off today, go think about a name for your newsletter, a purpose of your newsletter, what problems are you solving, and then ask people to sign up for that branded piece of content that you are offering, and that every month you're giving people the best in your local market, the best in your industry advice on whatever the topic is.

Thinking about “Act Now” special offers. I’m not a big fan of discounts and staffing, but there can be ways to come up with limited-time offers that create a fear of missing out. And then to incorporate those offers with your website, because people don’t like to miss out on an opportunity for something of value. And when it’s a limited time that they can take advantage of that opportunity, you’re going to get more response. Your website, or specific landing pages associated with your website, are the perfect place to try out those offers to see what works. You’ll see an example of that before we’re done here today.

When I mentioned earlier, as recruiters, you guys have tons of expertise. A lot of job seekers and even employers would love to have the opportunity to talk to a recruiter—not so the recruiter can sell them something, but so that the recruiter can coach them. How do you hire? How do you structure your job process, your hiring process? How do you design the job post? What’s the right salary? What’s the right benefits? As staffing and recruiting firms, you guys have more expertise about the market that’s relevant to the people who are trying to hire than anybody else in the world, and your clients would love, and prospective clients would love, to be able to take advantage of that expertise. So that’s an example of something you might offer on your website.

Now, what gets in the way that stops people from taking action? Well, there’s a lot of websites in our industry; there is no offer; there’s a contact us page—that’s it. There are offers that require emotional commitment. Sounds hard. Emotional commitment means I’m doing something that could be scary, fearful to me, or something that I worry about. Submitting a job application requires a pretty massive emotional commitment, especially if I’m employed. I am now committing to looking for a new job. If you’re the first company I’m applying with, I might want to talk to somebody before I do that. I might want to have a chat before I submit the application. I might want to know more about the job before I send you my resume, because I know as soon as I send my resume in, someone’s going to contact me, and I don’t have time. So if you think about the offers you’re making as a company and think about the employer’s perspective, the job seeker’s perspective, where might they get emotionally caught up because they’re afraid? They don’t know how to do something, and they don’t want to look foolish. They’re afraid they’re not going to be good enough to apply to your job, so they’re just going to give up without trying. They’re going to be afraid that you’re going to reject them; they don’t want to be rejected. They’re going to be afraid that you’re just going to waste their time. So we want to think about the emotional barriers that people have to responding on your website.

It sounds silly, like an emotional barrier to a website. Yeah, it’s real. It’s the same reason we hesitate giving out our email address to get another email newsletter, because we don’t want something in our inbox, and we’re afraid of some what someone might do with our email address. There’s an emotional commitment that we have to help people overcome. People don’t have an attention span. We’ll see that illustration a second, but our attention span is less than eight seconds. So if we don’t make it really painfully obvious what people should do to find the answers they came to your website to get, they’re gonna leave. And there’s just crappy design. If the design of your website does not match what your salespeople and recruiters are saying—they’re talking a great game, they’re highly professional—now your website looks like it was designed eight years ago. That creates distrust. When the look of a company doesn’t match the words, people will take the least common denominator and assume that’s the one that’s true. So we’ve got to make sure that the design fits the message. Bad copy—that’s either too long, too salesy, too much hype. You’re going to see some examples a little bit, but you don’t want copy that is just bragging about things that there’s nothing to back it up, because that kind of copy does not sell; actually, it turns people off. And because of that attention span issue, really long copy, while great for search engines, is tough for humans; um, they don’t read it. So we need to balance how we use long and short copy to work for people and for Google. Then lack of clarity. It’s sort of amazing when you even look at your own website, you could think you’ve done a great job in writing stuff that’s crystal clear—again, I’m guilty as charged here—and then you go back and you re-read it. You try to put yourself in the mind of someone who knows nothing about your business, knows nothing about your company, your industry. Well, is the copy clear? Is the navigation clear? Are those calls to actions clear? Or did we use words that people wouldn’t understand? Did we use words that were hard to follow? Did we use phrases that made it hard to read, to just not crystal clear what we’re asking people to do? And again, just like the lack of attention span, they don’t have patience. We have just a few seconds, and this is true on every device. I was on a flight yesterday, sitting next to a woman who was probably in her early 20s, and I was astonished how rapidly she could go from thing to thing to thing on her phone—like she could read one text, respond to it, be on to the next one, then be playing some game in less than one second. It was it was awe-inspiring. But because of that, um, we as humans now have an attention span that is less than that of goldfish, and I wish that was a joke. Goldfish actually can pay attention longer than the average human. So when we’re designing our websites, you know, we can’t assume people have more than eight seconds. Usually we tell people three to five seconds is about all you’re getting before people make a decision: I’m staying or I’m leaving.

All right, let’s start getting into the specifics. You’re gonna design for response. How do we do this? Well, conversion rate optimization isn’t a whole art; there are conferences dedicated to this, so I’m going to do my best to give you a quick overview. So first thing, our goal is to get someone to a thank you page from where they’re starting—sorry, I left the word out there—in the headline, to a thank you page. Thank you meaning they’ve filled out a form, they’ve applied to a job, they’ve done something we’re trying to get them to. So if we’ve got a blog post, we’re attracting people to the website with useful information, but then we’ve got to think about where are they going to go next, to the thank you page? How are we going to get them there? When people go to your services page, they’re looking to understand what you do, but you’ve got to tell them what you do in a very compelling way and give them, on that page, a reason to take action now. When they’re on the about page, they don’t want to know what you do; they want to know why you do it. They want to understand who you are as a company, and we now we’ve got to give people a reason to want to choose you over every other staffing and recruiting firm. And when we get to that contact page, we’ve got to make it super easy for people to take action. And this doesn’t have to just be on a contact page; we really want it easy to take action on any page. And as I said, for every page in your website, we’re going to be thinking, how will people get to this page, and what do they want to do next? So we assume a lot of times people go top to bottom, home page down, but when you do a search on Google for something, it’s going to show you the page that has the best answer, and then it may show you below that lots of other pages you can click on. So visitors are coming to your website through lots of different entry points. We’ve got to think about, based on how they got here, what do they want to do next, and how do we make it easy for them to find it. So what happens when people do your get to your website? They want to know: What do you do? How do you do it? Can you do it for me? Am I in the right place? And if they can’t answer those four questions in three to five seconds, they’re going to say goodbye. So it may not be about staffing; it might be about any issue, but they want to know about what you do, how you do it, can you do it for them, and that last one, am I in the right place to get the answer to the question I’m thinking about? That’s what we’re trying to do with our websites. And too often we write really clever copy that lacks clarity; we’re not answering to: What do you do? How do you do it? Can you do it for me? Am I in the right place? So what happens is that clever headline actually throws people off. They may like it, and they find it intriguing, but they read the top of your website, and they’re just not sure what you do. Then they get to something that describes what you do, and a lot of the bragging, and like, okay, now I see what you do, but I’m not really seeing how you’re different than everybody else, because you’re kind of saying points about yourself that everybody else is saying. And then they start reading more about the specialties and things like, you know, we’re the most experienced, and our service is great, and we ask the right questions, and they’re starting to doubt whether or not your company is right for them. And then they start to get the long copy that they have to read to explain what you do, and they just give up: I’m not going to do this.

So instead, we have to think about clarity. And how do you design a high-converting web page? The header says what you do. The clever copy—it should be there because that actually does differentiate you—but it goes lower in the page. You need primary and secondary calls to action—more on that in a second. You want to incorporate social proof. So anytime you’re saying something about why you’re wonderful, you’ve got something to back it up. You may want to have an explainer video that really shows how to work with you, how you’re different. You want images that people relate to; they see themselves in who you are. And you want calls to action that are repeated. So what does that page look like? Now we’ve got a main headline that is crystal clear: What do you do? It’s not clever; the clever is going to be in the subheads—could be right below the main headline or those ones, those that say H2 down the page. It’s great to be clever as people are reading through copy, because clever is more interesting to read; it keeps people reading. Clarity gets people to understand either what you do or the problem you solve. You’ll notice that there are logos suggested right after the top of the page: Can I trust you? A lot of staffing companies don’t want to show their clients’ logos for fear the competitors will call on those companies, but if you look at almost every technology company, they have logos right on there. Why? Showing who you work with is probably the single biggest credibility builder you have, because if those companies trust you—especially if they’re companies that are well known—other people will trust you. Then you do the “How do you do it?” So that’s where a good explainer video comes in. Rather than just an image, having a video made that explains your service process, your uniques, why you do what you do, can also be part of that explainer video, so people understand your mission, your purpose. As they get down into it, they—you now you can use subheads to show who you do it for: where you specialize, the skill disciplines, the industries, the geographic location, the size companies. So people say, “Oh, you really know how to work with individuals who are just like me.” And then you support that with testimonials, other people saying, “Yeah, these guys are really good.” Now, it could be testimonials; there’s lots of kinds of social proof; could be reviews, could be video testimonials, could be data and performance metrics, but you’re looking in that box says testimonial, really thinking proof points to back up the copy, so it’s not just about making unsubstantiated claims.

There are some counter-intuitive best practices that go into design. You want to use proven layouts. A lot of people talk about using either an F layout or a Z; I’ll show you the Z in a second, but you don’t want to be overly creative with how you lay out the page, because if you’re creative, it may look cool, but you’ll confuse people. And again, in three to five seconds, if people are confused, they don’t take action. You don’t want to differentiate on usability. It may be boring to make your site, from a usability standpoint, lots very similar to the way other staffing websites work, but that’s actually to your advantage, because if people come to your website and they already know what to do, they’re much more likely to take action. The UX should be frictionless. How can I minimize the number of clicks, the number, how far people have to scroll? How can I make it easy on any device for people to take the actions they want to take? How do I align the visual hierarchy with the messaging design? Well, that’s that’s a mouthful. So thinking something that’s important should be bigger than something that’s not important. So the things that are most important about your business should be the big headlines and the big pictures; the things that are less important should be smaller and de-emphasized. And a lot of you probably have carousels. I was surprised by this stat: Only 5.7 percent of people who see a carousel will click to go to the second image. So if you’re hiding really good content behind carousels, it’s time to get rid of them and think vertical pages. So here’s that Z structure; it’s very commonly used: your logo in the upper left, a sign-up or take-action button in the upper right, the big hero image to draw people’s eye and have that one clear message, and that can be followed by those primary and secondary calls to action—it’s like I said, we’ll tell you about just a minute—then that brings your eye down to the helpful text and then another call to action button. You’ll see almost all of the e-commerce kinds of companies design their websites to use this shape, because essentially what you’re thinking about is how do people, people’s eyes work, and do I design my content around someone’s eye flow? This is a Z pattern. I also mentioned there’s an F pattern: People read across, down, across, down, across, down—that’s how they go down the page, and each time they go a little less to the right. I’ll show you something in the end about how you can test your site to sort of figure out what’s working by using heat mapping.

All right, some more counter-intuitive best practices on messaging. As I said, focus on clarity over clever. To see, assume anyone knows what you do or how you work; it’s got to be in your website to explain even the basics to people. Now, if the majority of your people are large users of staffing companies that are very sophisticated buyers, I wouldn’t make my copy talk at an elementary level, but I would show those people the information they need to really understand how to best work with a company like yours, because they maybe they’re brand new in their job and they don’t know how to work with someone who’s a supplier to a high-volume staffing user. Use headlines and sub-headlines that make copy easy to skim; they don’t read; they read all the headlines and then they determine where they’ll pay more attention. Keep the paragraphs short; a lesson I had: One sentence can be a good paragraph on a website or in an email. Keep your paragraphs very short. Add testimonials and social proof to every page of your website; they should be integrated and relevant to the content on the page. And those unsubstantiated claims—if you don’t have data, testimonials, or reviews that back up your claims—take them off your website; they actually damage your credibility. Websites that convert are actually not about design, even though that’s where we spend all our time when we build a new website. Design does matter; it adds credibility, but it’s your copy that sells. I apologize to our creative team and our writers who are probably looking at each other right now saying, “I disagree.” Maybe the writers are saying, “I agree,” but the reality is is great copy is what sells; great design is what keeps you engaged with the copy.

All right, let’s go through some page-by-page best practices. Let’s start with the homepage of your website. So a bunch of things we’re going to look at, and I’ll just put them all up here. So we’re going to use proven design layouts: a linear layout, kind of like the diagram you see, one section after another, and a Z pattern to how people are going to read the content. You can kind of see you went across the top; there’s a gold box; you come down to the left; there’s another box gets your attention. So if you’re following a Z, it keeps pulling you down and left, down and left, keeping you engaged in the content. You want to use descriptive calls to action, and here’s the two different types. Very often we see it says headline; there’s two boxes; there’s a transitional call to action, something like, “Hey, learn more about this.” It transitions to getting information; it’s a very low emotional risk call to action. And then there’s a direct, which is a higher emotional, like, “Apply to a job,” “Search our jobs,” “Request an employee,” “Buy now.” Those are direct calls to action. And right in that first section, it’s good to have transitional and direct calls to action for different types of visitors. Now, because you can have employers and job seekers, it can be difficult to have too many calls to action, so you may think about what’s more important. Probably for the job seeker, they may want direct; the employer is probably going to be a transitional. Then we want clear benefit-oriented value proposition in that first section, that big headline—that’s the clarity around the value you provide, what you do as a service, descriptive or a problem you solve—talks about including a value stack. These are reasons to choose you, and you can kind of see those where it says the guide; this the the words on the right here are from a model called StoryBrand, and essentially it’s thinking about what are the three most important reasons somebody should choose you over anybody else? What are your three most important key differentiators? And then that also can be outlined by your followed by an outline of your proven process: How do you do things to make it work? A best practice is actually including some copy that about the cost of not using you: What happens when people don’t work with companies like yours? What’s the usual in your industry? I know we’re working with an IT staffing company right now, and you know the cost of not working with this company is that you’re going to get way too many unqualified resumes, because that’s what most of their competitors are doing is how fast can they get a resume out, not how good is the resume. This one I love: Position yourself as Yoda. So if you don’t mind the Star Wars analogy, Yoda was not the hero; Luke Skywalker was. Yoda was the guide that made Luke a hero. Your client should be the hero on your website, not you; you’re the Yoda. Your copy should be written in a way you’re talking about how you help people be successful, how you help people find better jobs, improve their lives, how you help people manage workforce challenges. You’re the guide; they’re the hero. As you go down the page, design each section to keep people scrolling; you actually want the sections so they’re not quite a full page, so people can see there’s more to come. And you want to use visual cues and text cues to keep people going down the page. You also will have the calls to action repeated throughout the site, so wherever people are, there’s an opportunity to go to the next level. You want to make sure your fonts are clear and legible, regardless if it’s a desktop, a tablet, a phone; it doesn’t shrink and become invisible because it was responsive, sure, but now it’s teeny and unreadable. And where you can add urgency, give people a reason to take action now. So all of that goes into a home page. How about your company’s services page? So again, it might look something like this when it’s well designed. Let me put up all the the things we’re going to do. I’ll take it back; we’re going to rather go through this one point by point, so the

Top section is about having the descriptive header again, just like the home page. It should have clarity; it should be about what you do as your services. It should not be clever, but you can be keyword focused here. It should have an immediate call to action in that first section. Don't make people scroll down your services page; take the next step; let them take action right there.

You want quick visual credibility—maybe it's the logos of your clients, maybe it's awards that you've won, maybe you put some testimonials right there, a video explainer if you've got a process that needs to be explained, if you've got a part of your value proposition out of a video, maybe it's just people meeting your team. Because seeing who you are adds credibility to your company because it's staffing, after all; it's a relationship business. People want to do business with you and know what you're all about.

You want meaningful subheads to tell a story as you go down the page. You want short paragraphs, images that are used to tell stories and support the text. You want that social proof integrated into the content—testimonials, reviews, logos of your clients, you want the faces of your team members ideally. Now, this might be, may not be practical if you've got a huge team, but if you've got smaller teams or you've got a team you want to feature, showing people who work for you—again, it's another credibility builder to see real people in your organization on your website. Data and statistics; they should be included in there to prove you can deliver on the promises you're making. The page should be long enough, sufficient depth to explain the services in a way that has clarity, demonstrates your expertise, makes people want to do work with you. You should repeat the calls to action throughout the site, particularly at the bottom before you get to the footer. I don't have a picture of it on here, but a chat bot, so somebody who wants to talk but not fill out a form has the ability to engage with you. So all of these things go into a good services page.

How about the About Us page? Again, this is about your why. So here we're gonna have a short, descriptive, keyword-focused header, calls to action for employers and job seekers. It should describe your organization's mission, vision, values. If you missed our last webinar on differentiation, go catch it, because that really talks about how to write out your mission, vision, values and make them your most important source of differentiation. It should highlight your team, or at least your leaders, so people get an idea of who I'm working with. What you think about why you started this organization—I want to know who I'm doing business with. If you do a lot of community service or you have a lot of affiliations, those should stand out in your website, so when you design the page, I can really see what you're all about very quickly. Again, this page is about your why; it explains to people why they should want to work with you for internal recruiting. A lot of your employment brand will come from this page. It's not just the About Us page; you can also think the subpages that might be in this section of the website, but we're thinking about all the reasons someone's going to want to have you as their staffing partner, going to want to have you as their career partner, or want to directly work for you.

All right, blog pages. This is another one where there's a lot of things to do for best practices, so let's kind of walk through a blog page. So again, keyword-focused header, which is your post title, should have keywords in it—the things people are searching for, the questions people are asking; those are gonna be the titles of your blog posts. You should have a relevant image, branded to your company, so when you share the post on social media, it's got an image that's gonna capture attention and it's branded to you. You should ideally have a picture of the person who wrote the post—again, building familiarity, building trust, building relationships. You want to have an email sign-up box—not "subscribe to our newsletter," but whatever publication you're offering, offer it right at the top of your blog, because people are interested in your content. Not everybody's going to read the full post, but as they start to see you have good ideas, they're going to want to subscribe to get that publication filled with your good ideas. You should use subheads, just like we did on other pages, and short paragraphs, just like other pages. We should be looking about numbered and bulleted lists—again, making it easy for people to read and skim through the text and get the important points out without reading every piece of content in the post. We should suggest related content to keep people on the site longer, and we should use graphical calls to action at the end of your posts to get people to take the next step. And I see most companies that blog skip this step; there's no related content and even less often are there any calls to action. And they don't just have to be at the end; they can be incorporated throughout the post, but at a minimum at the end, something that's graphical that draws your eye that tells you, "Here's what we want you to do next."

The contact page: the form should be really simple. You want your phone number on that page, even if you're a big company—what number, what's the corporate office number people should call? Or if you don't want them calling the corporate office, then get me to a list of all the offices so I can find someone to call, because that's most often what candidates are coming for is they need a phone number, also an address or locations list or a page, a link to pages with your locations, a map at a minimum—your corporate headquarters or maps that go with every office so I can get directions. A lot of people are on their phone trying to figure out how to come in for an interview; make it easy to do that from your contact page. Link to other relevant forms—some people may come to your contact page that really wanted to request an employee or apply to a job. We want to reinforce that you can do that from this page. And then a kicker is some sort of final assurance—maybe it's repeating a testimonial, maybe it's repeating your rewards, but so when somebody's about to submit a form to you, you're just reminding them, "We're a great company; you're gonna be happy working with us." And so this is a page layout of a design form where you can see a really short, simple form, a map, some additional calls to action for people who might not want to fill out the form but might want to call or chat, other links in case you really didn't want to fill out a form, but maybe you needed support—there's a support center, the "stay updated"—there's an opportunity here to opt in to this company's information and social media to stay connected. So this is an extensive contact page, but it conveys a lot of the elements that are recommended to help you maximize response, because think about the very beginning—all those different people coming for different reasons—now we're giving them different ways to take action.

How about thank you pages? So again, the thank you page is what happens after somebody fills out a form, but you want to make sure there's a genuine thank you there. You want to clearly tell people what to expect; set the expectations—are you going to follow up in 10 minutes, in 24 hours, within a couple of days? Let them know what happens next. Have an offer—if they didn't just opt in to your e-publication, maybe this is where you offer it, or maybe you give them a video to watch or an ebook to download or other content you could recommend. Again, you're building your credibility and you're giving somebody something of value as part of thanking them for filling out a form; it helps to strengthen your relationships. This is another good place to include your social media; this is a place to help build your social following. And bonus: if you're not using marketing automation products—a HubSpot, an ActiveCampaign—you want to integrate these forms so it automatically follows up with people and does a lot of the email-based follow-up as soon as somebody fills out a form. So there's going to be an offer coming up in just a minute to get a review of your website, and when you fill in the form, what you'll see next is this thank you page. We say thank you; we tell you that we're going to be in touch with you; we give you a few things additionally you can do to get valuable content right away, and we have a subsequent offer if you need help and want to talk to someone right now.

Testimonials: almost every staffing company uses them, and there are ways to use them really well. You want your testimonial to have a really good headline—ideally 10 words or less—details that is filled with target keywords, attribution. I know we can't always get all of this, but if we can, the picture of the person, their name, their title, the company they work for—if it's from an employer, I know this can be hard to get all of this stuff, but the best testimonials have all of these elements; the more you can get, the better. I know some people are afraid of doing it; sometimes you can't because your clients won't allow you; you live with what you can do, but try to get as much as you can. And if it's from an employer, their logo of their company—why the logo? Because a lot of people won't read all the text, but if they see the logo of the company—I know we're working with a company in Cleveland, and they worked one of the top employers in town; using that company's logo in their recruitment marketing was huge for them because people would see that logo was an instant credibility builder. So historically, employers were very reluctant to give staffing companies permission to use logos, but now with everybody struggling to find talent, you're gonna find a lot of your clients are more than willing to let you use their name and logo if it helps you attract the talent they need. So on our website, we use all these; we actually also include a video. So we've got a headline—"Here's Tom thanking us for the website we built"—some details about what we did, Tom's picture, Tom's company—only thing we didn't have in this one, we didn't have a picture of his company's logo, but we added in the video. Is that good? You don't always have to do everything; I don't think we had his logo to add in there, but you want to do as much as you can when you use testimonials on your websites.

Sign-up boxes: again, it's not a newsletter, but we want to make sure that what we're asking people to sign up for stands out; it sells the publication or the offer. You only want to ask for an email address if you can; don't ask for other fields. You can ask for more later, but right now, just get their email address. Offer social proof. So here's a fictitious one I made up for this um, if you had an email publication called "Hired: Design for Talent," here you go; you're selling it with a headline and a subhead; you tell people to subscribe, what they're gonna get—just put in your email address—and then a testimonial from someone who is a subscriber, how much they liked it. All of this goes into a really good offer to get someone to respond to something as simple as opting into a candidate-focused email publication. If you're doing an ebook, if you're doing a whitepaper, if you're asking someone to watch a video on demand, you want to put it in a box like this where you're selling the content, because again, it's overcoming that emotional resistance to somebody giving you their email address.

Navigation: put it in the place people expect; don't be clever and hide it somewhere else, and make it descriptive. So I showed you the bad example upfront; don't do that. One of the ones I'd love to take credit for—this we didn't design it, but I like what Adecco did—so they've got actually different navigation if you're an employer or a job seeker, and you can see that the words they're using in the nav bar for job seekers are really descriptive, not quite as descriptive for employers, but completely different, but what they're doing is they're making it easy for people to understand from the navigation what to do next, where to get to the information that they want. They're not going with the simple generic one-word. So, David, I will change my copywriting and not do that anymore and try to be more descriptive.

All right, let's wrap it up—a few final thoughts. So how do you start? We just did a ton of stuff in this hour, and I'm sure it feels a little overwhelming. Don't try to do it all. First thing is go shop your own website. Look at your homepage—what's the message? Does it match what you want to say? What's the look? Is it up to date? Does it represent what your salespeople and recruiters are saying? Are there calls to action? How about your career portal? Go through and apply to a job—how long does it take you to apply? Can you do it with one click? If it takes a lot of time, you probably want to rethink that apply process or rethink your career portal. Test out your forms—are you asking for more than you need? Can you get away with making fewer fields required or fewer fields on the form at all? Anything over three fields reduces the number of people who reply, and email only, while not great for giving your sales team, your recruiters a lot of information, is the easiest form for people to complete. How about your blog page? Do you have clear conversion paths? When someone reads a blog post, typically the most common entry page for your website is your homepage, followed by maybe a few specific jobs, followed by your most of interest blog posts; a lot of traffic is coming to you as the blog post as their entry page, so is it really clear where they go from there if they want to learn more about your business? And those thank you pages—make sure they're designed to reinforce the value, and again, if you can integrate them with automation, makes a huge impact on ensuring you provide a great experience to everybody who engages with your site.

Get data. This is where you dig into Google Analytics—how many people are coming to the website? Where are they coming from? Where are they going to when they first get to us? Where are they leaving? So we want to know what's working and what's not working, and to me, those exit pages are probably the most important because those are the first ones I look at; those are the places people are leaving, and if it's not from a thank you page, then we lost them before they took action. If we look at the—and I don't have the the date on here; I just should have put bounce rate as well—you know, if you've got 60 percent of your people bouncing away, what more can we do to get people to stick around longer? And what I mentioned at the beginning is heat maps—tools like Crazy Egg and Hotjar—that will show you examples. This shows how far people skim down the page—on the left, red shows percentage of visitors who viewed that page; you can see as it went down the page goes orange, yellow, green, light blue, and eventually we go to dark blue, meaning people aren't going that far down the page. This is why you have to design the site with those Z patterns and using text and design that pulls people down the page, otherwise they're not going to get very far. The heat map on the right shows what people are looking at, what their what their mouse is pointing to, so the more the deeper the color to the reds, the more people who are using that part of the page, and you can use this heat mapping to figure out what are people seeing and what are they missing. Another thing that I like is you can also look at where people are trying to click that's not really clickable, where you need to have some ability to have an action that is not existent, because somebody thought that picture was clickable and it really wasn't. And if all else feels, just talk to people—ask your salespeople and recruiters about the questions they get and make sure you're answering them with your with your website, your blog posts, profile your clients and candidates, build demographic profiles, create personas; do this to try to figure out how do we create the best content and the best offers for our audience. Observe people using your site—just see what they're doing. You know, the best tools you have don't cost anything—your brain, your eyes, your ears, your mouth, asking questions—those are the best ways to optimize your site.

Okay, want some help doing this? Wanna know what we think about your site? Actually, our team will be happy to do a review for you. I mentioned it; you can go to this website—haleymarketing.com/website-review—go in there, and our team will go through a 30-point checklist and give you back our feedback on what we liked and what we think could use some improvement. And if you have questions, we're at the top of the hour; more than happy to stick around and answer questions for people. You can also reach out to us—888-696-2900 or info@haleymarketing.com. And finally, um, our next webinar is a really big one; we are doing our Smart Ideas Summit number two. We did this last year for our 25th birthday, and we're doing it again on September the 8th. It is an all-day event; it actually starts at 9:00 a.m. Eastern, goes to 5:00 p.m. We have 14 speakers, some amazing guests coming to speak; we're going to be doing 14 different basically TED Talks—really quick 30-minute presentations where we're going to give you some absolutely incredible content, and every 30 minutes will be something new to listen to. So go check out haleymarketing.com/smartideas2, and you can see the agenda and sign up to grab a seat. I think we're about two-thirds sold out already; was still a month to go before we're up or almost a month ago, so don't wait, grab your seat. And from everybody and Haley Marketing, thank you so much for being part of today's Lunch with Haley webinar. If there are any questions, again, feel free to use the question box; I'll be happy to stick around.