Confessions of an Executive Restaurant Recruiter

Not often do I ask a favor of my readership, but today I am. I really don’t need I dime, I need your input. If you don’t have much time to read today, either come back when you do, or skip down to the last paragraph and read the bolded sentence.

I don’t really know how many of you (all 5 of you, I am up to five readers now, right?) know that I have established another business unit whose goal is provide SEO (search engine optimization) and web services for recruiters and small business, but if you don’t, you will after reading the rest of this post. My favor is that I’d like for you to visit another website and give me some feedback on it.

Our new company is located at www.recruiting-usa.com and it is packed with service offerings that could be useful to many of you. Recruiting-USA.com started out as a domain name that I purchased to provide one master domain for many recruiting specialties. If you wanted to find healthcare recruiters and jobs you would go to healthcare.recruiting-usa.com; IT recruiters and jobs would be at it.recruiting-usa.com; general sales would be sales.recruiting-usa.com… you get the idea. It was going to be a memorable, findable domain name where I could add top recruiters with different sub-specialties to my firm and have a separate look and feel for each one.

A funny thing happened on the way to that plan. I left my old job at an MRI franchise office and started my own firm - CEC Search. With the business just starting and without the umbrella support of a large organization like MRI, I felt that I needed a first class website that ranked very highly in SERPs (search engine ranking placements) so that CEC Search would have legitimacy, weight, and reach. The project of building the website and obtaining high rankings on Google and Yahoo was rather daunting and could be very expensive. I decided that I would take the project on myself. So I dove in and did tons of research on SEO and effective ways to make search engines rank your site in the top results. After building the website, I put together my comprehensive program for moving CEC Search steadily up the rankings. I was pretty successful at doing that (you can see some of the results for SEO consulting here) with over 55 #1 keyword listings in major search engines and over 230 first page listings, all for great, relevant keywords for the restaurant industry and recruiting specialty.

Shortly after having achieved what I thought were spectacular results I had the chance to consult for another recruiting firm owner, Peggy McKee of PHC Consulting. Peggy had a one page site that was static and hosted for free one DotEasy. The hosting and website were worth the price that she was paying, with traffic to her site that was very minor and no listings on major search engines. Peggy hired us to redesign her website, build her blog, integrate her recruiting software [Big Biller] with her website, and perform SEO on an ongoing basis. Peggy’s firm, PHC Consulting recruits in the medical sales arena, specifically laboratory sales. Her new site went live on Jan 31. I’m happy to report that she has seen traffic increases on the order of forty fold (so far) and business has grown so much that she is adding another recruiter (after being a solo practitioner for over 7 years.)

The great success of my site and the work that we did with PHC Consulting (especially the targeting of medical sales jobs, pharmaceutical sales jobs, and laboratory sales jobs in search engines) gave me the idea that a lot more small to medium sized recruiting organizations could use that kind of service. So I decided to launch our next enterprise, web services for recruiters and small businesses and give it the domain name that I had set aside for me - Recruiting-USA.com. That we we could have a site that acts as a portal for all kinds of niche recruiting firms and give them a one stop shop for all of their SEO and web service needs. We offer website design, hosting, domain name forwarding, blog building and hosting, SEO consulting, and technology consulting.

What I would like from you (if you’ve read this far, thanks so much) is for you to visit the site and give me your feedback. We have a home page that describes our services and a blog with helpful free tips on blogging, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing; plus free webmaster tools.

The Recruiting-USA.com website is pretty new and I’d love to hear what y’all think needs to be added, changed, intensified, reworked, better explained, or left alone. If you would be kind enough to share you thoughts, it would be amazingly helpful.

There is a contact page for the site, which will send me an email. Be sure to check out some of the articles including my series on WordPress 2.1 plug-ins and one that should be helpful to all (inspired by a post on JibberJobber about their winner of the You Get It award) "Building a personal brand? You need SEO too!"

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