RocketSourcers

Phase 1: Start.
Building a WordPress website

The situation

No website. No traffic. No online presence. We needed to be live quickly. Our general thought was: The recruitment market in the Netherlands is crowded, and every day without a website meant missed opportunities. Working with a UX/UI designer, we started with WordPress. Pragmatic, not perfect. The goal was simple: get a professional site online within weeks that we could iterate on.

What I focused on

• Clean site architecture for future SEO growth
• Fast baseline performance
• Strong technical foundation (semantic HTML, proper heading structure)
• Easy content management for the team

The result

Live in 3 weeks with proper Google indexing from day one.

This wasn't meant to be the final solution. It was a strategic starting point. Something we could test, learn from, and evolve as the business grew.

The Nuxt 3 Migration.
When Speed Became Critical

Six months in, WordPress started showing cracks.

Traffic was slowly building, but page load times crept toward 3 seconds. The site felt sluggish. Optimization plugins could only do so much. The foundation wasn't built for what we were trying to achieve.

Why this mattered

• Slow sites rank lower on Google (our main acquisition channel)
• Sluggish performance kills trust with corporate clients
• We needed a foundation that could scale

The decision: Migrate everything to Nuxt 3

This was risky. A complete rebuild meant potential downtime, broken links, and lost rankings. But staying on WordPress meant hitting a ceiling.

I rebuilt the entire platform:

• Converted WordPress theme to Vue components
• Implemented server-side rendering for SEO
• Optimized data fetching and state management
• Set up modern CI/CD deployment pipeline

The results

• Page load times: from somtimes 3 seconds to 1 second and under
• Lighthouse score: to 99
• Site felt instant, like a native app

This migration created the foundation for everything that followed. Without this performance base, the SEO growth wouldn't have been possible.

Fast site? Check. Now we needed people to find it.

I ran a comprehensive SEO audit. The results: RocketSourcers wasn't ranking for any valuable search terms. "Talent sourcing," "IT recruitment," specific roles. Competitors owned page 1.

The strategy

Create landing pages targeting real search intent.

Working with the team, we systematically built optimized pages for:

• Specific services (sourcing vs. recruitment)
• Target roles (frontend developers, data engineers)
• Industries (tech, fintech)
• Locations (Amsterdam, Rotterdam tech hubs)

Each page targeted actual queries from companies looking for sourcing help.

The impact:

• monthly traffic grew from 0 to over 800 monthly visitors over three years
• Started ranking on page 1 for competitive terms
• Contact form submissions increased significantly
• Brought in major clients, including AAFF

The Nuxt 3 performance gains enabled better rankings, but strategic content is what brought actual traffic and converted visitors into clients.

Behind the scenes, the team was wasting hours on manual work.

The problem

Recruiters posted jobs in their CRM (Recruitee), then manually copied them to the website. Formatting, categorizing, SEO optimization. Hours per week. Jobs would go live in the CRM but take days to appear on the site. eventually it became Frustrating inefficient and completely avoidable.

The solution

Our solution was direct API integration. I integrated the Recruitee API to automatically sync all active job postings in real-time. Every time a recruiter publishes a job in the CRM, it appears on the website within minutes. Properly formatted, categorized, and SEO-optimized.

What this solved

• Zero manual work maintaining job listings
• Jobs always current (no delays)
• SEO boost from fresh, regularly updated content
• Team focuses on actual recruitment, not website maintenance

This turned the site into a living job board that required no upkeep while driving consistent traffic.

SEO was working, but we hit a new bottleneck: every blog post required my time.

The team had valuable insights to share. Hiring trends, market analysis, sourcing strategies. Content that would improve SEO and demonstrate expertise. But they couldn't publish independently.

The solution

I built a system using WordPress as the CMS (familiar, easy for the team) while Nuxt handled the frontend.

What this enabled

• Anyone on the team could write and publish instantly
• Page loads stayed under 1 second
• Full design control on the frontend

Content velocity increased immediately. The team went from "let's schedule this for next sprint" to publishing within minutes.

New challenge: writing quality competencies for every vacancy took too long.

Clients would send job descriptions, and the team needed to craft 4 SMART competencies for each role. This was time-consuming and the quality varied depending on who wrote them.

The solution

I built the RocketSourcers Competency Scan. An AI-powered tool that turns a job description into 4 perfectly formatted SMART competencies in minutes.

How it works

• Paste the vacancy text
• Answer 3 questions
• AI generates 4 SMART competencies
• Choose: keep them, rewrite them, or regenerate a new full job description with SMART competencies integrated

The results:

• Minutes instead of hours to create quality competencies
• Consistent, SMART-formatted competencies for every vacancy
• Team could process more vacancies faster
• Better candidate expectations from the start

This tool became a key part of RocketSourcers' service delivery. Fast, consistent, and professional.

We'd built powerful features and grown traffic to 800 monthly visitors. But we were still guessing about what actually worked.

• Which pages converted visitors into leads?
• Where did people drop off?
• Which traffic sources brought quality prospects?

Time to stop assuming and start measuring. I implemented Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager with comprehensive event tracking:

• Form submissions
• Job application clicks
• Scroll depth and engagement
• Traffic source analysis

What this enabled:

• A/B testing different page layouts based on real conversion data
• Identifying which content drives leads
• Understanding user behavior to improve UX
• Proving ROI with hard numbers

Analytics transformed decision-making from "we think this works" to "we know what drives results."