Staffing Robot - Web design and marketing services for companies in the staffing industry

Staffing Robot Gets a New Look!

There's a saying you may have heard before - "the cobblers children have no shoes." This saying could definitely be applied to us. When we launched Staffing Robot as a website design and marketing services firm for staffing companies we were overwhelmed with the amount of companies seeking out our services. We love all the companies we've had the opportunity to work with and are really proud of the work we've been doing together. But we've been doing so much work we never really took the time to do any for ourselves.

Until today!

We're completely excited to now show you the new look of Staffing Robot.

Next week we'll be launching our new brand to include a new website, mobile website, blog, social pages, portfolio site and much more!

Here are the new items we're looking forward to showing off.

New Logo:

We've always had a bit of a retro look and color palette but wanted to take this even further. We've created lots of different robots but we'll let you find them all on our site next week. 

New Website:

With our website we had 3 main goals (stop me if you've heard this one before):

• Simple
• Useful
• Creative

We think we achieved these goals. Instead of having too many options and a bunch of content to navigate through we've created only two main navigation options (About and Services) that take your through a few slides each, describing the services we offer and information about our company.

From there, we made finding the services customers are interested in super simple. We consolidated this information in one location - right under the 'How can we help?' tab found along the bottom of every page.

Finally, instead of a traditional website look we went with something more unique and creative. We built the site to work more like a presentation and it's lots of fun to swipe through on your iPad. Give it a try!

Our old corporate site was located at http://www.staffingrobotonline.com. However, starting next week you'll find our corporate site at http://www.staffingrobot.com and our blog at http://www.staffingrobot.com/blog.

New Mobile Website:

One of the best services we provide to staffing companies is mobile website design and development. So,of course we couldn't forget a mobile site for ourselves!  Our mobile site is simple to get through, optimized for smart phones and provides you with all the information you need to learn more about us or contact us.

New Blog:

Staffing Robot started as a blog so we put some extra attention into our new blog design. Starting next week you'll find our blog at http://www.staffingrobot.com/blog. Our new blog will let you easily explore categories, feature our latest blog, comment on our posts and view our social streams. Also, since we had so many people interested in advertising with us we've created some ad space to help promote your services! Want to run an ad? Contact us and let us know.

Our goal is to keep bringing you relevant news and information on the staffing industry, specifically related to design, marketing and technology so be sure to subscribe to our blog via RSS or email.

Social Sites:

We are also updating the look of our social sites next week so be sure to follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook to check out the new pages!

New business cards:

Note the new phone number! 866.991.1849.

T Shirts!

Oh yes! We also have T-Shirts! Everyone loves T-shirts right? If you're a Staffing Robot customer we'll be sending you one of these. If not, but you [robot head] staffing tell us and we'll let you know how to get one!

We have much more to announce related to our new brand over the next several weeks, but we'll leave it at this for now. Let us know what you think about our new look below. And, if you're ready to be our next innovate client, be the first to use our new contact form on our new site (my personal favorite part of the site).

And don't forget - starting next week, you'll find our company site at http://www.staffingrobot.com and our blog at http://www.staffingrobot.com/blog.

Medical Solutions'- 3rd annual Nurses Week Humerus T-Shirt Design Contest

Medical Solutions just launched their 3rd annual Nurses Week Humerus T-Shirt Design Contest!

Big prizes on the line including an iPad3, iPod Nano and $100 iTunes gift card, plus vouchers to Scrubadoo.com and Fibers.com. This is just the start to our Nurses Week celebration, which officially kicks off May 6th.

Here is a link for details. http://www.fibers.com/contests/nurses-week-2012.  

Nurse Statistics Infographic

Some very interesting statistics and information on nursing you've most likely heard, laid out in a nice infographic. This one comes from Wall Stats, created for nursingschool.org.  

Image provided by Nursing School.org

Hello Nurse: Nursing Infographic

Another great infographic on nursing. This one comes from http://master-degree-online.com/

The decision tree at the top is a nice touch.

Infographic: The Role of Nursing in the Military

Here's another great nursing infographic. This one describes the role of nursing in the military.

 

(Click to enlarge)

[Via: Carrington College's RN programs]

The work was done by: http://submitinfographics.com/

Commissioned by: http://carrington.edu/cc/programs/nursing-registered/

http://carrington.edu/ccblog/programs/registered-nursing/history-of-nursing-in-the-military-infographic/

Onward Healthcare travel nursing infographic

Great infographic by Onward Healthcare titled 'A Guide to Travel Nursing Jobs.'

Data for the Onward Healthcare travel nursing infographic included motivational factors for choosing a travel nurse career, age demographics, benefits information, and social media usage of these travel nurses. The guide also highlights salary info for travel RNs and a timeline of the travel nursing process.

 

© 2011 Onward Healthcare

Medical Solutions Announces Nurses Rock! 2nd Annual Nurses Week T-Shirt Contest

In observance of the approaching 2011 Nurse's Week, Medical Solutions, Fibers.com and Scrubadoo.com have partnered to bring you Nurse Rock! Nurses Week T-Shirt Design Contest. This is a contest where Nurses and Nurse-aficionados can create clever and compassionate t-shirt designs all for the appreciation of the Nursing profession.

Beginning April 12, users may submit endless designs using the simple yet powerful Fibers.com design tool. No design skills necessary! Fibers.com has everything you need to create your own contest entry with over 500 fonts and 10,000 images.

All entrants will receive a $10 gift card towards their next purchase at Scrubadoo.com (Limit one per person). The contest ends May 12, the birthday of the founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale. Three winners will be chosen to win over $1000 in prizes, including an Apple iPad 2. Vote for your favorite design today!

Visit the following link to view, participate, and vote in the contest:

http://www.fibers.com/contests/nurses-week-2011

 

Staffing Robot Healthcare Staffing Website Design Services Re-design!

We've been kind of quiet over the last couple weeks but we haven't gone anywhere. In fact, quite the opposite. Recently we brought on several new clients that all have great projects. We'll show you the work we've done for them once we're finished.

We also decided to redesign our website and change up some of our service offerings. We simplified our site and made things easier to find. We also think it's a much better way to showcase our software products for healthcare staffing agencies and our sample work portfolio. Check it out: Staffing Robot Healthcare Staffing Website Design.

In addition, over the last couple of months we've had a lot of staffing companies and healthcare organizations inquire about our prices and the specifics of the services we offer. So, in an effort to make things even more straight forward we've listed all of our pricing and services directly on our site!

Other companies try to complicate or hide their pricing. However, we want to be different and make things simple by putting all of this right on our site for you to see. Now you can easily find the specifics of each service we offer and choose the ones that best fit within your budget.

Staffing Robot New Service Offerings:

Website Design for Healthcare Staffing Companies. We now offer 3 design packages to chose from. You can select from our 'Starter' 'Moving Up' or 'The Show' packages.

The Starter and Moving Up packages allow you to chose from template based themes that all come with a Content Management System for easily updating your site. The Show package provides you with a custom website design and advanced interactive options that will help you grow your business and recruit new healthcare professionals. These new services help you chose a package that best fits within your budget.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Your Healthcare Staffing Company. Staffing Robot now offers 3 Search Engine Optimization packages that will help you meet your goals within your specific budget. Our Recruiting SEO package is focused on helping your improve your recruiting strategy for healthcare professionals. The Client SEO package is focused on ensuring new clients find you when they need your services. Finally, our Total SEO package is a complete SEO package for your entire website that focuses on both recruting and obtaining new clients.

Healthcare Staffing Social Media Marketing. Whether you're just starting out with social media or ready to launch a successful campaign, we now have 3 packages designed to help your healthcare staffing agency with social media marketing. The Starter package gets you set up on the social media platforms of your choice. The Social Media Management package gets you going with advanced ROI and brand management tracking. The Social Media Campaign package delivers a complete Social Media Marketing campaign to you that will positively impact your social media recruiting and client acquisition strategies.

Branding and Logo Design. Staffing Robot will help you create and promote a winning brand. Our branding packages give you everything from basic logo design with our Starter package, to delivering business card and letterhead layouts with our Premium package, all the way a complete brand identity for your staffing company with our Deluxe branding package.

Staffing Robot Software Product Offerings:

Email Marketing Software for Healthcare Staffing Companies. We launched ePromoter a few months ago and have been really please with the adoption so far. Several staffing agencies have told us they really love the application and the ability it gives them to create and track the success of their email marketing campaigns. Sign up today and start sending e-newsletters to your healthcare professionals and clients.

Hively. We'll reveal more about this product soon! In the meantime, look out for invitations to be a beta tester!

As always, Staffing Robot can also help you with custom software and mobile web development. If you need a company to help bring your new idea to life or to ensure your website provides the same experience to your customers on mobile platforms like iPads and smart phones - we can help.

So take a look at our new site and let us know what you think. If you have any questions or would like a free estimate on your web project let us know and we'll get started right away!

Nursing Shortage Info Graphic

Another great info graphic.

Recently I posted on the info graphic on salary data related to Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA's). In that post I stated that I've seen very few info graphics detailing data related to healthcare staffing. Glad to see that I was wrong on this, as I think info graphics are an excellent way to quickly and easily communicate helpful information.

Even though the economy has seemingly slowed the nursing shortage, most data suggests it hasn't fully gone away and in fact will only get worse over the next several years. This nursing shortage info graphic from Veterinary Technician is very interesting.

Via: VeterinaryTechnician.com

How Healthcare Staffing Agencies Can Benefit From Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

"The purpose of SEO is simple - to increase conversions." What is a conversion? A conversion is some form of measurable event. It can be different for every company - a phone call from a customer, filling out your website contact form, or a product being purchased from your website. This is the single most important purpose of SEO - to create these conversions. This post is part of a series discussing 10 web marketing tips your healthcare staffing agency should do right now.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Your Healthcare Staffing Agency. Many people still have a hard time understanding the value of SEO or what SEO really is. Yes, many components of it can be technical, but understanding the basic concepts will help you make the best decisions you can when it comes to SEO for your medical staffing company.

What is Search Engine Optimizaiton (SEO)? Search Engine Optimizaiton (SEO) is a process whereby a set of skills and techniques are applied to a website in order for the site to be properly indexed, ranked and displayed by search engines. Or, put more simply, it's making sure your customers find you when they search for relevant words on Google, Bing and other search engines.

Why should you SEO your staffing agency's website?

1. SEO is timely. Your web advertising (banner ads, PPC, Facebook ads) might not be reaching your customers when they are looking to buy or even paying attention. SEO ensures your customers find you when they need to and when they are searching for you.
2. SEO is cost effective. SEO campaigns cost a fraction of offline marketing. For example, a typical print ad in a national magazine can cost you $20,000 - $40,000, minimum. This is the cost for only one ad and how do you even know it's reaching the right people? A good SEO manager or company can run a successful campaign that produces real results for 5 - 10% of this cost.
3. SEO helps all of your marketing efforts. From content creation, to site performance improvements, to link building campaigns – all of these efforts serve to promote your brand, strengthen your marketing and increase conversions. Further, it's critical that you realize SEO is a process, not an event. The more content you create, links you earn, and improvements you make to your site performance, the more return you will see on your investment.
4. Gain valuable insights. If you pay attention to your site analytics (which goes hand in hand with SEO) you'll gain valuable insights into the minds of your customers. It will teach you more about the services they're looking for and the words, questions, and phrases they're using to find them.
5. SEO evens the playing field. Even if you're a new per diem nursing company only servicing one city, a successful SEO campaign can get you listed right along side some of your largest competitors. Successful SEO requires a degree of agility that big companies often can’t manage.

Here are some do's and don'ts to help you get stared with SEO.

The Do's

1. The most effective SEO strategy is to create a great website for your healthcare staffing agency. Great websites are interactive, relevant and provide useful content to their customers. Great websites will always rank highly because search engines are designed to do just that. Even Google suggests you design for your customers, not for SEO.
2. Research. Lots of companies tell us the keywords they want to rank for when we start an SEO project. However, often times, data from our research suggests these are not the best keywords for them to use. It's very likely that what you think people are searching for to find your business is not supported by good research data. Do your homework first.
3. Choose the right URL. Key words within a URL may be the single most relevant way to show up when your customers search for you. Keep them simple and to the point, and no - they do not have to use your company name. Say someone is searching for “Seattle Nurse Staffing Agency.” All things being equal, the site www.seattlenursestaffing.com is going to have a higher ranking than www.carenursesplus.com. Google highly prioritizes keywords contained in the URL.
4. Use page titles. Your page title is arguably the most valuable place for keywords on every page. This title helps the search engines easily identify your page.
5. Create meta descriptions. A meta description is essentially a description or summary of the page contents. It has a significant impact on your search engine ranking. This is what shows up as your description in the search results. Use keywords and make it relevant.
   
   
6. Earn links from relevant sites. Search engines give high ranking preference to sites that have inbound links from other sites. The more links, the more important your site appears to search engines. But not all links are the same. Sites linking to yours should have a good reputation and contain content that is relevant to your content. If the search engines deem these sites otherwise it can hurt your ranking.
7. Name Your Images. Give all of your images a relevant, keyworded title and use both alt and title attributes as well. Think of it this way - search engines can’t actually see images, but they can read the alt and title tags. This includes your logo. Calling your logo something more keyword specific than "logo" will go a long way.
8. Link your keywords. Does your site have the words 'Click Here' hyperlinked to take you to another page? If so, you're basically telling Google you'd like to rank for the words 'Click Here.' Oops. By hyperlinking words you're telling Google these words are important and relevant to your content. Make sure that's true. Instead of 'Click here to read an article on improving your staffing agency's website' try 'Click here to read an article on improving your staffing agency's website'.
9. Create relevant and useful, keyword driven content. Keep the buzzwords to a minimum and make sure your content is useful, relevant and clearly states what you do. Most importantly, don't forget to use your keywords and make sure they match your content throughout the page.
10. Remember that SEO is a process, not an event. I've talked to so many people that say "we've already done SEO." That's the first way I can tell they aren't effectively deploying SEO tactics. SEO is something that needs constant management, monitoring and improvement. Even if you see good initial results, these results can slip without warning if you let up on your efforts. Most importantly, just remember that your competitors are doing the same thing you are. Steady wins the race here.

The Don'ts

1. Break the rules. Unfortunately with SEO there are a lot of rules and the rules change all the time. If you don't follow the rules the consequences can be worse than if you didn't do any SEO at all.
2. Keyword stuff. You can use too many keywords or overuse key phrases. Doing so will negatively affect your site's ranking.
3. Duplicate content. Blatantly copying content from another site is a bad idea for several reasons. One of them is because it will hurt your search engine rankings. This should be fairly obvious. Perhaps less obvious though is how you're duplicating content within your own pages. This includes your title tags, meta descriptions, etc. I just ran across a site last week where every page (all 30) has the exact same title. This has a very negative effect on your SEO.
4. Using images instead of text. Recently we were doing SEO for a staffing company that had just completed their website design. Unfortunately the web designer used images for all the headings instead of text. Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) play an important role in SEO. They should include relevant keywords for the page. Using images instead of text looses you points in this area. Speaking of headings, remember that the lower the heading number, the more relevant it is to search engines (an h1 carries more weight than an h3 tag).
5. Take down linking sites. If you have multiple brands or products, having multiple sites actually helps you. As long as you are not duplicating content, you are effectively adding more content to the web and creating another location from which you can link back and forth. I recently talked to a company that wanted to take down their other product sites because they felt they were "competing" with their main site. Not so. Keep these sites going if you want to keep your SEO.
6. Use 'black hat' tactics. In the past, people have attempted to trick the search engines. Just don't do it. These tactics are called 'black hat' SEO tactics. The penalties for getting caught are not worth it and you will get caught. For example, in some cases, people have attempted to create invisible text by making the font color the same as the background color of the page. They then put the text at the very bottom of the page, so that the visitor won't see it but the search engines will. This doesn't work and the search engines will catch and de-list you.
7. Forget about local. If your company's business is mostly done in your local area, such as a per diem allied nursing agency, local SEO tactics are a must. Even if you are a national company, many local SEO tactics can help you. Local SEO is it's own ball of wax so we'll cover that more in detail in a later post.
8. Don't post too many links on a single page. Google suggests you use less than 100. Even this number is high for most companies. For example, unless you are listing jobs or something similar, I can't think of any reason a healthcare staffing agency would want to have so many links on a page. Keep the number low and the links relevant.
9. Use too much Flash. I'm not in the anti-Flash camp but I do think you need to be cautious if you're using Flash on your website. Currently, Flash is not supported on mobile devices like iPhones and iPads. In addition, many hospitals don't have Flash (or at least not the latest version) installed. Therefore, using Flash can make your content inaccessible to many of the people you're trying to reach. Further, it is very tricky (if not sometimes impossible) to SEO a Flash site. Play it safe. Almost anything you'd want to do in Flash as a healthcare staffing agency can be done with JQuery and JQuery does not have these same issues.
10. Use competitors names in your SEO. Some companies think they're tricky by using names of their competitors in their SEO campaigns. Don't do it. No one thinks you're clever and in fact, many people will just think you're shady. It's a bad practice and will potentially do more harm than good.

Summary

The two most important things to remember are that 1) a good website design is the best SEO strategy you can pursue and 2) SEO is a process and not an event. If you haven't started your SEO project it's better to do so sooner rather than later. Further, if you're getting ready to build a new website it's always best to do your SEO first. This helps with the content, layout and navigation decisions. If you design first, you can find yourself having to do a whole bunch of rework. 

What's next?

Although everything in this post can get you off to a good start with your SEO efforts, it's really just the beginning. There are several things to consider in order to produce real results you can measure. Hiring an SEO company with specific knowledge of the healthcare staffing industry is an excellent way to ensure the results you're looking for.

If you'd like more information on running a successful SEO campaign contact Staffing Robot and we'll discuss your goals, and figure out how to best get you started achieving them.

Next post - The benefits of blogging to your healthcare staffing company

Of all the marketing efforts your staffing agency takes on, blogging is the most simple, cost effective way to promote your brand and create content. In the next post we'll discuss the benefits of blogging for your healthcare staffing agency and help you get started.

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