Recruitment SEO

Stephenson Executive Search approached us as they felt somewhat “left behind” online. They had been monitoring their competitors and seeing them generate new enquiries from both clients and candidates through their website.

Rightfully so, they wanted their own piece of the pie and asked us to deploy a strategy to start ranking in Google for keywords that were important to them, as well as keywords we felt would be beneficial for them too.

After performing some Semrush keyword research, we noticed quite quickly how much competition was involved with this project. Due to being an executive recruitment agency and wanting to target difficult keywords, we certainly had our work cut out for us.

While Stephenson Executive Search had a good website, there was plenty that we needed to do to improve their site speed, keyword optimisation, and overall website health.

They had a number of WordPress plugins that needed to be relicensed and many more that needed updating safely. We also provide regular updates and changes to the website when asked by the Stephenson Executive Search team.

We also optimised various other areas of their website, which include;

• On-site linking to relevant articles and pages.
• Fixing website speed. This was hurting search engine ranking massively.
• Monitoring and redirecting broken links found on their website.
• Correcting heading structure and layout.
• Correcting alt tags on their images.

With the recent Google Algorith updates, content is now more important than ever for growing websites in Google.

Working with our professional content writer, Eddie Hall, we regularly provide professional content for Stephenson Executive Search in the form of article posts.

We then get these article posts ranked in Google and start gaining traffic from potential clients who are researching the industry.

View one of the articles here: What Does A Chief Executive Officer Do?

One of the most important steps for any SEO campaign is building backlinks from other websites. Backlinks are considered the “currency” of SEO in 2025.

Quality backlinks drive fast and measurable results when executed correctly. We reach out to blog owners and professional article writers with websites that hold some degree of relevancy to Stephenson Executive Search and get a link back to the website.

For this project, backlinks were essential due to the massive competition in the SERPs (search engine results pages). After 2 – 3 months of building high-quality links, we managed to jump in Google right up to the first page for some great keywords.

We’ve already seen a massive jump in awareness for this project. Below you can see a graph taken directly from Google which shows the amount of exposure this website has received over the last few months. As you can see, there was a massive jump when we got involved.

The red arrow shows where we started this project.

• Over the last 12 months: 953,000 total impressions.
• Impressions jumped from 1,100 to 2,500 per day in September (a 127% increase).
• Then climbed again to 4,300 per day in February (a further 72% increase.