What is SEO?


Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about setting up your site and content to ensure it has the best possible visibility within search engine results, which primarily means Google due to it's market dominance. Results optimised for Google will also perform well on other search engines like Bing typically.


Read Moz's Comprehensive Beginners Guide On SEO


REC+ SEO Architecture


REC+ has a sound SEO architecture that has underpinned strong results for businesses, including those switching from other platforms whose SEO architecture was sub-standard.  It's inherent structure is designed to present your content and data to search engines in a friendly way in accordance with their technical guidelines and product data feed APIs. Architecturally, our system is therefore at least equal to any other systems on the marketplace who adhere to Google's SEO guidelines, including: Wordpress, Woocommerce, Magento (with the appropriate SEO plug-ins) and Shopify. Given this, ultimately your rankings will  be affected by the quality and usefulness of your content and how you demonstrate your expertise, experience and trustworthiness (covered in the section 'Content Is King').


Our comprehensive in-built SEO features have the ability to:

  • Easily add/edit content onto web pages 
  • Create blog posts and link these to social media accounts
  • Create internal links between pages
  • Set up category and product pages with structured titles, descriptions, multiple images, videos, reviews and more
  • Add 'Expert Answers' so website visitors can ask questions while reading a web page or product page and receive answers which can also be published back onto the page for other readers to view and search engines to index
  • Display reviews on pages from Google My Business and review engines such as Reviews.io
  • Create testimonials
  • Build and present good looking case studies using Page Slices 
  • Showcase customers by name/icon in a rotating carousel 

    And at a technical SEO level:
  • Pages are created with search engine friendly URL's
  • Configurable meta data (titles, descriptions and keywords)
  • Upload and name files in an SEO friendly way
  • Set alt text on images
  • Use micro data for products
  • Direct different versions of the same URL to a single version, typically the "www." version
  • Autogenerated sitemap
  • URL Redirect manager 
  • Autogenerated robots.txt file with ability to turn off indexing for system pages and product filtering 


Content Is King


Relevant high quality content is the key element for you to focus on, as it is this which ultimately affects how search engines return your pages via search queries. It is important you write content from the perspective of the reader first, so that is it useful to them, and then optimise it for search engines second.  


Page content should follow Google's EEAT & YMYL concepts:


E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines—the handbook that real people use to evaluate the quality of search results.These people are known as Quality Raters and their feedback helps Google measure the success of its algorithm updates.


YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics could significantly impact readers’ health, financial stability, safety, or well-being. Common YMYL topics include finance, medicine, and current events. These pages need to demonstrate the highest levels of E-E-A-T.


Product Data Quality 


Product data quality is especially important to focus on in terms of good product titles, clear product images and videos, use of brand names, strong descriptions and relevant options and attributes, product reviews, associated / alternative / add-on products, relevant downloadable documents and guides.


Remember: Ensure all images you upload to the site are optimised to have the lowest possible file sizes for faster page load speed. In addition, we use thumbnailing, caching and WebP browser support to deliver faster load times.


Product Data Feed


Product data can be fed into Google Shopping via our Google feed so you can advertise your products online. We provide tools which monitor feed issues highlighted by Google in the Merchant Centre plus ad visibility.


Improving Your Rankings & Increasing Your Traffic


Improvement to your rankings is therefore possible through creating high quality E-E-A-T content that is useful to your readers such as unique search optimised page content, informative articles and blog posts, positive reviews, testimonials, case studies, accreditations, insurances, FAQ's and answers to questions via Expert Answers. 


Major ways to acquire traffic online are:

  • Paid advertising - this remains the #1 way to target people and drive leads and revenues.
  • Social media postings and engaged communities (e.g. facebook, tiktok and specialist forums or human-curated sites like Reddit) - these are often more about brand awareness and results vary greatly dependent upon the type of business you have.
  • Email and SMS campaigns - reaching out to opted-in subscribers through either bought-in lists or your existing customer base, in line with GDPR requirements.
  • Organic search improvements to pages - these build more slowly over time compared to paid advertising and other methods.
  • Link building - either people link to your content naturally because it is so useful or you outreach to other website owners asking them to link, which is a time-consuming process. The more links you have to your website from trusted domains, the higher your 'page rank' which also pushes your website higher upsearch engine rankings.
  • Domain age - contrary to popular beliefs held by the SEO community, the age of your domain does not impact on SEO as confirmed by John Mueller at Google.

Site Launch Process


Launching your site correctly is critical and we recommend following a thorough site launch process with plenty of time allowed for proof reading, content sign off, plus comprehensive testing for user journeys, forms, checkout process and browsers. During site launch the website is also submitted to Google for indexing.


Analytics & Search Console


We integrate with Google Analytics and Google Search Console so you can monitor the health of your site (indexing, crawl stats, 404 errors etc) as well as traffic, events, revenues and conversions.