By
Austin Coker
Reading time: 13 min
Last updated: October 29, 2026
It’s Monday morning, you open last week’s form fills, and the first eleven are résumés. The hiring manager you were paying to reach is nowhere in the list.
Most staffing agencies don’t fix this by spending more. They fix it by changing structure: running separate campaigns for employers and candidates, bidding only on employer-intent search terms, blocking job-seeker queries with a strong negative keyword list, and tracking which leads become qualified employer opportunities in the CRM. When those four pieces are in place, Google Ads for staffing agencies starts sending you companies that need people, not people who need jobs.
This guide covers why job seekers flood staffing campaigns, which keywords to bid on, a negative keyword list to start from, how to split campaigns, what to put in employer ads and landing pages, how to track lead quality, and when SEO and GEO should join your paid search.
Your agency sits on both sides of the hiring market, and so does your vocabulary. “Staffing agency,” “temp agency,” and “recruiter” are words a warehouse manager types when she needs ten pickers by Friday. They are also the words a candidate types when he wants one of those ten jobs.
Google matches ads to intent signals in the query, and for broad terms like “staffing agency” or “temp agency near me,” the candidate side of the market usually searches far more often than the employer side. If you bid on those terms with broad match, no negatives, and a homepage that has both a “Find a job” button and a “Hire talent” button, Google will happily send you whoever clicks. Job seekers click a lot.
The landing page makes it worse. A visitor who arrives on a page with job listings will apply, and that application often fires the same conversion action as an employer inquiry. Smart Bidding then learns that résumé submissions are success and goes looking for more of them. The account isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what you told it to do.
Employer searches include a qualifier that signals the person is buying staffing, not looking for work. Build your keyword list around those qualifiers:
Industry and role combinations are where your best leads usually come from. “Staffing agency for food manufacturing” is a narrower query than “staffing agency,” but the person typing it almost always has a production floor to fill. Start with the verticals you already place well in, then expand.
Use phrase match and exact match for these terms while you build up search term data. Broad match can work later, once you have offline conversions telling Google what a qualified employer looks like, but early on it pulls in too many candidate queries to be worth the cleanup.
Check volume and cost for each term in Google’s Keyword Planner. Some niche industry terms will show low volume. Keep the ones that match your placement strengths anyway, since one employer account can be worth months of placements.
Negatives do most of the filtering work in a staffing account. Add this list at the account level or as a shared negative keyword list applied to every employer campaign:
Phrase match negatives catch most variations without blocking legitimate employer searches. Read through the list before applying it, though. If you offer payrolling or employer of record services, “pay” as a broad negative will block “payroll staffing services,” so switch it to exact match or remove it and rely on more specific negatives like “pay rate” and “pay per hour.” Google’s help page on negative keywords explains how match types behave for negatives, which differs from how they behave for positive keywords.
“Near me” needs case-by-case review rather than a blanket block. “Temp agency near me” is mostly candidates, but a facilities manager looking for a local staffing partner types the same thing. Review “near me” queries in your search terms report and add the specific job-seeker variants as negatives (“jobs near me,” “temp work near me,” “staffing agency hiring near me”) while leaving the employer ones running.
Most staffing agencies still need candidates, and paid search can help on that side too. Just don’t let both audiences share a campaign.
Set up the account this way:
On the candidate side, paid search often isn’t your cheapest option. Making your job postings eligible for Google’s job search experience with job posting structured data puts openings in front of candidates without paying per click, which frees more of your ad budget for employers.
If your account mixes employer and candidate traffic today, restructuring it usually takes less time than another month of sorting résumés out of your lead list. Our PPC for staffing agencies team builds and manages employer-focused campaigns.
Your ad is the last filter before someone clicks. Write it so a job seeker reads it and knows it isn’t for them. Qualifiers like “For employers,” “Need temp staff?” and “Hire” do that work in the headline itself.
Pin the employer qualifier headline to position one if candidate clicks keep creeping in. It costs you some ad strength score, but a lower score is a fair trade for cleaner traffic. Sitelinks should point to industries you staff, roles you fill, and the request-staff page. Leave out any sitelink to job listings, and use callout extensions like “Temp, contract and direct hire” or “Serving [metro] employers.”
Sending employer ads to your homepage gives a hiring manager two doors and gives a job seeker one more chance to apply. Build dedicated employer landing pages, ideally one per major vertical, with these sections:
Leave job listings, “Apply now” buttons, and “Looking for work?” links off these pages entirely. If you want a candidate path, put it in the footer navigation of the main site, not on a page you’re paying to send employers to.
Counting form fills is how most staffing accounts end up optimizing for job seekers. Track what happens after the form instead.
Set up lead stages in your CRM or ATS that match how your sales team actually works:
Capture the GCLID (Google click ID) in a hidden field on every employer form and store it with the lead record. Then use Google Ads offline conversion import to send stage changes back into Google Ads as conversions. Enhanced conversions for leads, which matches on hashed email instead of the click ID, is another option if your forms or CRM make GCLID capture difficult.
Once those imports are flowing, set your employer campaigns to bid toward the qualified employer stage, and add opportunity and placed as secondary conversions so you can see which keywords produce revenue. Bidding on the raw form fill teaches Google to find people who fill out forms. Bidding on qualified employer teaches it to find hiring managers.
Even a well-built negative list misses new job-seeker phrasing. Review the search terms report for every employer campaign weekly.
Each week, go through it with three actions in mind:
Pull the leads from the past week alongside the report. If a keyword keeps producing “new” leads that never reach “qualified employer,” it’s either attracting candidates or the wrong type of employer, and it should be paused or narrowed.
Geo targeting should mirror how you actually deliver staff.
For branch-based temp and light industrial staffing, target a radius or set of zip codes around each branch metro, roughly the commuting area your workforce can cover. Run one campaign or ad group per branch so the ads and landing pages can name the city and the budget can follow each branch’s capacity. Set location options to “Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations” so you aren’t paying for clicks from people elsewhere who are merely researching the area.
For national niches, such as travel nursing, IT contract staffing, or executive search for a specific industry, target the whole country (or the regions where clients concentrate) and let the industry and role keywords do the qualifying. A hospital CFO in another state is a valid lead if you place nationally.
Costs differ sharply between these setups. CPCs vary by metro and industry, so check them for your own markets in Keyword Planner before setting budgets.
Google Ads gets you employer leads as soon as campaigns go live, and stops the moment you stop paying. Organic channels take longer to build but keep sending leads without a cost per click.
Add SEO once your paid campaigns have shown you which employer keywords and verticals turn into placements. Those are the pages worth ranking organically, and staffing agency SEO lets you capture the same searches without paying for every click. For agencies focused on permanent and executive placement, our SEO for recruiting firms service works the same way. If you’re comparing partners, our roundup of the best SEO agencies for recruitment agencies covers what to look for.
GEO, or visibility in AI search, matters because hiring managers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode which staffing firms to use for a role or region. If your agency isn’t mentioned in those answers, a competitor may be. One recruitment firm we worked with, Constant Hire, generated over $70K in revenue from ChatGPT in four months. We cover how to get there in GEO for staffing agencies and GEO for recruitment agencies.
The candidate side is shifting too, as more agencies use AI recruiters to screen and engage applicants. That makes it easier to keep candidate sourcing out of your paid employer budget altogether.
Austin Coker is the CEO and founder of 95 Projects. He has worked in SEO since 2020, when he built and sold an ecommerce brand that grew mainly through search. He founded 95 Projects in 2022 to help SaaS, ecommerce, and B2B service companies show up wherever their buyers search, from Google to ChatGPT and AI Overviews.
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There’s no single number. CPCs depend on your metro, your industry, and how many other agencies bid on the same terms, and niche vertical terms often cost differently than broad staffing terms. Check current bids for your exact keywords and locations in Google’s Keyword Planner, then set a budget that can produce enough clicks to generate qualified employer leads each month.
Yes. Employers and candidates need different keywords, ads, landing pages and conversion actions. Combining them lets cheaper, higher-volume candidate clicks absorb the budget and teaches Smart Bidding to chase applications. Give each its own campaign and budget, and add employer keywords as negatives in the candidate campaign.
Start with jobs, careers, apply, resume, CV, salary, pay, wage, hiring now, openings, vacancies, entry level and no experience, applied as a shared list across employer campaigns. Review “near me” queries individually rather than blocking them all, and check terms like “pay” against any payroll services you offer. Add new job-seeker queries from your search terms report every week.
It can, but it’s a poor starting point for employer lead generation. Performance Max runs across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps with limited visibility into which queries trigger your ads, and while Google has added negative keyword support for it, you still have less control than in a standard Search campaign. Build employer Search campaigns with offline conversion tracking first. Test Performance Max only once Google is receiving qualified employer conversions to learn from.
Clicks start as soon as campaigns are approved. Lead quality improves over the first several weeks as you add negatives from the search terms report and your CRM begins sending qualified employer conversions back to Google Ads. The faster your team updates lead stages, the sooner bidding starts favoring real hiring managers.
Yes. We build and run employer-focused Google Ads for staffing and recruitment agencies, including campaign separation, negative keyword management, employer landing pages, and CRM-based offline conversion tracking. See how our PPC for staffing agencies service works, or book a call and we’ll review your current account.
