Case Study: Aerotek: Leading Technical and Engineering Staffing Agency
“We paid for a year-long search engine marketing engagement after just one month of working with iProspect. This proves to us that the results iProspect is capable of achieving are
truly worth the investment. Never did we expect this type of ROI and so quickly. We’re very excited about what’s ahead.”
- Todd Gardner, Director of Marketing
Situation
Allegis Group is the world’s largest privately held staffing company, made up of a variety of
business groups that focus on a wide range of industries. Aerotek, Inc., one of these business
groups, has been recruiting and placing employees in the technical and engineering fields since 1983.
The main purpose of the Aerotek Website, at Aerotek.com, is to assist companies in finding qualified
job candidates for mostly contract or temporary job placements. The site can also be utilized by
employers to manage their contract workforces (e.g., payroll, time sheets etc.) if they require such
services.
The Aerotek site can also be utilized by job seekers to find job listings, but to post a resume
they are directed from the Aerotek site to a proprietary job board at Thingamajob.com – a free
online employment resource provided by Allegis Group for its complete family of companies.
At the outset of their search engine marketing campaign with iProspect, Aerotek marketers were
looking to boost the visibility of their website within the major search properties, thereby
increasing the number of visitors to the site. Their overall goal was to connect more employers
with qualified job candidates by increasing the number of employers visiting the site as well as
the number of job seekers.
Challenges
The first challenge for the Aerotek Website was that the use of JavaScript within the site’s
main navigation hindered search engine spiders from accessing and indexing the site’s content. The
limited internal linking structure within the site also made it difficult for spiders to locate
and index all the site’s pages.
Another challenge was the client’s use of over 30 vanity domains - multiple copies of the site
under different URLs. Such a technique can cause the original website, as well as the duplicates, to
be banned from search engine results.
Additionally, the pages of the website had very little text-based content for spiders to index. This
lack of content also decreased the chances of obtaining directory listings, because directory editors
prefer content-rich pages. The website was also missing optimized meta data within the HTML code from
all of its Web pages. Meta data is another component search engine spiders use to rank websites on
targeted keywords.
To gain better visibility and drive more traffic to the website, Aerotek’s internal search team
prepared to re-design the site with the help of iProspect.
Solution
The iProspect team assisted Aerotek by recommending that the JavaScript navigation be
removed. Additionally, the iProspect team researched, and carefully selected, target keyword phrases
and worked with the client to develop and optimize new content around these targeted keywords.
To begin the process of rectifying Aerotek’s use of vanity domains, they began by setting up 301 redirects
for all 30 URLs and after a few months, the vanity domains were shut down permanently.
Also at the recommendation of iProspect, Aerotek implemented separate sub-domains to categorize content
and increase the opportunity of obtaining directory listings and links from partner and affiliate websites
with related information and subject matter as part of iProspect’s relevant content endorsement™
strategy. Each sub-domain contained keyword-phrase-centric URLs for each of the Aerotek industries served.
Finally, iProspect worked with the client to implement keyword-rich meta data on all pages of the
website. The group wrote unique meta data for all of the pages before launch, as well as prescribed
H1 page heading tags.
Results
Aerotek.com was successfully launched. Because of careful keyword selection and development of
keyword-rich, relevant content, as well as the creation of sub-domains, the site was crawled and
indexed by the major search engines quickly, and visibility continues to grow.
With just one month’s campaign results, the client covered the cost of their annual search engine marketing engagement with iProspect through the incremental fees paid to them by employers who hired candidates from the Aerotek.com Website.
One year after campaign start, the number of monthly search visits to the Aerotek.com Website increased by 275%.
Overall online visibility, as a result of natural and paid search engine optimization efforts, increased by 224% in one year. Top-ten rankings alone increased by 290%.
Aerotek.com has surpassed all its top competitors in terms of overall rankings within the major search properties. Aerotek.com outranks its closest competitor by 485% on non-branded keyword phrases.
del.icio.us
