Seasonal Trends
Visibility Vs Authority
Link Acquisition
Content Performance
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The HR Services Market Report looks at the top 47 Human Resources Services sites in the UK.
The report gives an overall analysis of the HR Services online sector, highlighting wins and losses over key performance areas. We research each aspect separately, so those ranking highly for one attribute – SEO visibility for example – might be lower down the charts in other areas like social performance or links.
We’ve also outlined where the keyword opportunities lie in this sector and where the highest competition is.
With this report on hand, Salience provides HR brands with an understanding of how their digital marketing efforts measure up to the competition; a snapshot of the industry’s digital performance for the year, trends and resulting opportunities for digital growth.
If you’re looking for a way to benchmark your digital performance against your competitors or see which areas need improvement from you, this free report can provide you with all of it. It will also give you a heads up on who to look out for in the coming year and which brands have made waves YOY.
We’d love to feature every single HR Services site, but we’d never fit it all into one concise report. However, we do gather data from the whole market to get our findings. If you can’t see your company name on our list but think you’d like to know where you fit in, get in touch. We’ll get your data to you, no problem.
The report shows you the hard data, but we wanted to give you a little bit more than that. So, we did our own research and found the best of the bunch for creative content, social campaigns and where the links are coming from to show you how it’s being done well in the HR services and consulting sector. Here are our highlights.
Improving visibility is so important for brands because it can be the difference between gaining those top spots on Google or not appearing at all.
Overall, it’s been a successful year for the Human Resources sector, especially for the top five companies.
Deloitte remains the market leaders and had a 52% increase in visibility.
Peninsula has taken 2nd place this year after increasing their visibility by 81%.
Accenture improved their visibility by 58%, putting them in 3rd place.
Rounding off the top five are McKinsey & Company (+37%) and Citation (+67%).
The rest of the top ten has been slightly more turbulent with extreme wins, losses and stagnations:
After the top ten, visibility drops significantly. So, this looks to be a sector that is dominated by a few, with smaller brands focusing on localised business.
Our report features a list of top competition and best opportunity keywords. These all have a high search volume, but the high opportunity keywords are less competitive, therefore offering a higher likelihood of ranking well if your page is optimised effectively.
Generally, this is quite a competitive digital landscape, with HR companies needing to compete with job sites, government advice sites and general articles about HR.
We have to commend Hunter Adams who is ranking in position 1 and 2 for the highest competition keyword, ‘HR consulting’, despite not even appearing in the top 25 brands for visibility.
Their pages are well optimised with multiple variants of the keyword in the titles and meta descriptions.
However, the top five are struggling to appear in search terms apart from Peninsula who is ranking in position 1 for the term ‘hr service’.
There are a lot of opportunities to be highlighted in featured snippets which our HR companies don’t seem to be making the most of.
HR News site Personnel Today is shown in multiple featured snippets for the terms ‘hr outsourcing’, ‘outsourcing hr’ and ‘hr outsourcing services’ all with the same guide on HR Outsourcing.
This in-depth content about the topic has gained them a precious featured snippet. According to a recent study by Ahrefs, 8.6% of clicks go to the featured snippet.
In order to get into a featured snippet, you need to produce rich content that provides answers to genuine questions that people are searching, be factual, make use of H2/H3 tags and do some keyword research.
Content is one of Google’s biggest ranking factors, especially since the core algorithm update earlier this year. Enriching your site with creative page copy, guides and articles could see your rankings soar.
Read more about featured snippets:
How To Find & Acquire Featured Snippets
What’s the Difference Between Rich Snippets and Featured Snippets?
At a top-level glance of the HR services and HR consulting industry, it looks like these brands have got a pretty good grasp on how to get high-quality links.
McKinsey & Company is topping the links charts with an impressive number of links per month of high quality.
They have a fantastic insight section which is where most of their links are going.
Their content platform is highly varied and covers very niche markets as well as broader aspects that can be attributed to most markets.
They also produce detailed reports which gain hundreds, if not thousands of unique links.
They clearly have their content and outreach strategy nailed down, so it’s worth taking a look at their content if you’re stuck for inspiration!
Deloitte is second on the list for links, but a lot of their links appear to be going to their US site.
Like McKinsey, they produce detailed articles and reports. However, their content also includes downloadable infographics and reports.
This kind of content is perfect for outreaching and gaining links from multiple sources.
For example, a report by Deloitte entitled ‘Football Money League 2018’ gained links from the football teams featured in addition to reputable publishers like Business Insider.
Having downloadable assets is also valuable because it gives you the opportunity to gather user data and potentially contact them in the future. This can head to a viable lead for your company.
BCG also has a fantastic Ideas & Inspiration section called the Henderson Institute.
They produce articles which use their own data to discuss various issues, meaning people can use them as references for their own articles.
Unique data pieces and surveys can be another fantastic way to gain links.
Accenture is topping the social charts with the highest owned social score and an impressive number of brand searches per month.
Their social media feeds vary across the platforms and are tailored to each platform’s strengths.
Here are some things we loved about their social media feeds:
McKinsey & Company is next on the list and do have an overall more corporate feel.
However, they do also post engaging and varied content including client stories, helpful articles and downloadable assets.
Both companies could do more in the way of producing engaging content.
One of the best ways to get your audience on side and increase your brand reach is by posting content that invites a response.
Competitions, polls and hashtags are some of the best and easiest ways to do this, also helping to build your brand culture and form relationships with new people.
Though Deloitte has the highest number of brand searches per month, their owned social score pales in comparison.
They are most active on Twitter where they post regularly, including information from their surveys, articles they’ve written and staff stories.
However, their Facebook feed is quite sporadic, and the content is not as varied.
They only have an Instagram account to promote their careers page and it mainly features images of their colleagues rather than any useful information for potential clients.
If they build up the other two platforms in the same way they have done with Twitter, they could see huge improvements in their owned social score.
No, all our reports are completely free. We complete various B2B market reports like this one to research industries we’d like to work with. Feel free to download the report at zero cost.
We try to cover as much as possible when we research and report on an industry. However, if you find you’ve been missed from our report, feel free to contact us and we can send you a personalised report containing your site.
If you want to know anything about the report or are curious about how we can create a bespoke SEO strategy for your brand, get in touch today.
