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MOST JOB-STAFFING services put marketing dollars into brand advertising. But Allegis Group is running in the other direction, building awareness almost solely through search marketing.

Allegis has a sales force that reaches out to employers to dig up exclusive job postings. Those openings — many of which are with Fortune 1000 firms — are listed on Thingamajob.com, where they're seen by registered Allegis job seekers.

But the firm differs from a Monster.com or CareerBuilder, where clients hire applicants directly. Instead, the employers pay Allegis, which then pays the salary and benefits of the staffer.

The privately held company began to focus on search about three or four years ago to market Thingamajob.com. The job-posting board's original design didn't lend itself easily to indexing by search engines, according to John Middlebrook, Allegis' director of Web and creative solutions.

“Our jobs were in a drop-down menu, so you had to choose ‘IT jobs in Maryland’ to see those,” he said. “So we started working with [search marketing firm] iProspect to incorporate static URLs and other changes that would let search engines browse for our jobs.”

The benefits to Thingamajob's organic search results were “phenomenal” — good enough to drive the optimization of Allegis' other subsidiaries like TEKsystems and Aerotek, which handle staffing for IT positions and light industrial or commercial fields, respectively.

Those sites also had a number of design problems that kept them from being properly indexed and ranked. For one thing, they used JavaScript for navigation, something the engines don't pick up on. They also contained text that was heavy on marketing-speak (“talent acquisition specialist”) rather than engine-friendly keywords (“careers,” “looking for jobs”), Middlebrook said.

He continued: “We had the copy rewritten by third-party copywriters who know how to write for the Web using keywords, using the right tags, and employing the right links with keywords embedded in the links. So we also started to see tremendous success with our Web redesigns. We've now gotten to a point where all our sites are optimized organically and doing really well.”

Organic improvement has occurred at different rates because the optimized sites were relaunched on different timetables. The improved Aerotek Web site debuted at the beginning of 2005, for example, while TEKsystems' new site went up at the end of the year. For that subsidiary, the company has bulked up its branded keywords from 16 to 79, and has increased its top-30 organic rankings by 103%.

On the job-seeker side, one of Allegis' problems had been a disconnect between the subsidiary Web sites (where people would start their job search), and Thingamajob (where the main listings could be found). So TEKsystems worked to integrate Thingamajob as a seamless application of the main site, with a TEKsystems look and feel. The result was a 125% increase in TEKsystems job applications in the first two months. “We're now forcing more resumes and more applications than ever before,” he said. “Those numbers are through the roof.”

Now Middlebrook is concentrating on cranking up the search program for five of Allegis Group's 20 Web sites, with iProspect's help. Allegis managed its sponsored-listing campaigns in house until about a year ago, but with more than 14,000 job listings and 280 regional offices, compiling and managing keyword lists for that kind of inventory is a daunting task.

“It's a painstaking process, and we realized we weren't doing it well,” Middlebrook said. The hand-off has been a gradual one, he added, because Allegis still knows its own business best and must contribute input to the pay-per-click (PPC) management process.

“We looked for a partner that would help us determine what the proper keywords were,” he said. “For example, our marketing team wanted to call one of their service lines ‘staff augmentation.’ I had iProspect help us look at the market, and we realized that nobody looks for ‘staff augmentation.’ By a 5-to-1 ratio they look for ‘staffing services.’ So [marketing] decided to change the name of that whole division around the [information] I gave them from search data.”

Allegis is working on specific “job pages” for TEKsystems that go out and pull up-to-the-minute national listings from popular Thingamajob categories such as “Java architect” and feed those to specific landing pages on the TEKsystems site. That's helped to increase the visibility of those pages for search engine spiders and elevated TEKsystems' organic listings. In time, that effort will feed into PPC campaigns built around those categories, Middlebrook said.