Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.
SEO Services In South Africa
Essentially, Search Engine Optimization is all about making your business more visible online. When someone looks for your product or service on a platform like Google, Yahoo or Bing, these search engines have to decide which of the millions of websites out there best answer their user’s query.
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages, or what you and I see when we conduct a search online) list websites in the order the search engine decides they’re most relevant to what the user asked. The more relevant your page or website appears, the higher your ranking in results.
But how does the search engine come up with these rankings? How does it decide which sites and pages deserve to rank higher up than others? The answer is pretty complex, (hence the need for dedicated SEO companies like us!) but that’s really what SEO is all about. Convincing search engines that your website, product or service is worthy of a top spot.
Below Are The Top 10 Best SEO Companies in South Africa
Ruby Digital
Mo.agency
Codepilot
Web SEO
Starbright
Blue Cabin SEO
Algorithm Agency
CassonMedia
SEOpros
Blue Magnet
Back in the day, you could hire anyone that knew how to stuff keywords into your page or website and it would make its way to the 1st page. Not anymore, as SEO is constantly evolving, it has reached a point where ranking alone doesn’t guarantee business results such as traffic or qualified leads.
To get the most out of any SEO investment in this day and age, there needs to be a cohesive strategy.
The cohesive SEO strategy must blend your website code, content marketing and information architecture (IA) with context to not only make your business discoverable online, but valuable to users.
Take this article you’re reading for example. If it wasn’t valuable to you, would you still be reading it?
What Factors Make for A Great SEO Services Company?
The Best SEO Companies are lead or owned by 1 or 2 SEO experts that have been working in the SEO industry for the last 5 – 10 years and know exactly what they are doing. These SEO specialists can read your website’s SEO like a book – They evaluate your entire website and determine where the weak spots are and focus on them.
The SEO specialist that has been assigned to your business only has a said number of hours to work on your SEO per day, that’s why they rely on their own staff to help them out. The staff members need to be highly trained in order to deliver tangible results.
So, you probably decided to work with an SEO company because you want to rank your site higher on Google, generate more traffic and drive sales. The thing is – Great SEO agencies, from experience working with different companies in different industries, know that the SEO strategies that worked for another company won’t necessarily work for yours. A great SEO company will value the opinions and needs of your company as nobody knows your niche, better than you.
After your discovery session and follow-up conversations with an SEO company, and once you have decided that it seems like a good fit for your business, you will receive an in-depth contract with deliverable results. A great SEO company won’t just send you any contract. In the contract, expect to see a detailed list of results that they will deliver(sometimes these details are present on their monthly invoice which is also good), how they plan on doing so and when you should start seeing results. Prepare to only see results after 3 months, and any earlier results can be celebrated as early wins.
After expressing your needs and your business case/business plan to an SEO Company, they use that information and combine it with their expertise to conduct in-depth research to bolsters your efforts. SEO specialists do this so that they can be on the same page as the client, the target audience and the industry niche.
Once the research has been concluded, you can expect a great SEO company to share their recommendations of what needs to be done in order to achieve the best possible business results.
One of the most important things to know as the client is that there are two types of SEO – Black-hat SEO and White-hat SEO. The last thing you want to do is sign a contract with an SEO company that does black-hat SEO, as the chances of Google penalizing and de-ranking your website are very high.
Black-hat SEO vs White-hat SEO Strategy
Black-hat SEO Methods:
Prioritizing the search engines only. This tactic includes exploiting weaknesses in search engines such as Google to get results/rank in a short amount of time. By turning the other cheek to the human users of the site and breaking the rules, SEO companies can rank a website very quickly. Sounds sketchy right? It is, and believe it or not, there are South African SEO companies that make use of these tactics.
However, Google has one more than one string to their bow. Constantly fighting and penalizing Black-hat SEO service providers, and sometimes even wiping a site off the face of Google entirely – destroying your organic search traffic and ranking. Black-hat SEO happens when SEO consultants cave to pressure due to low self esteem, and try and deliver unsustainable results to a client who is not educated in the time periods it takes to secure solid stable Google rankings.
It is up to a SEO consultant to educate their client and follow a moral code to not engage in black-hat techniques(which are not ‘intelligent’ tricks in any way). Black-hat leads to losing all your SEO value, so really it wipes out your SEO investments which could have been months or years of investment.
White-hat SEO Methods:
Prioritizing the user. Focusing on the human audience that will be interacting with your website and its content. White-hat SEO involves consistently pushing out QUALITY content, links, technical SEO work, that is informative, easy to read and properly optimized. The White-hat method is the correct way to do SEO, it definitely takes time but as we know – good things come to those who wait. “In SEO, the tortoise beats the hare, every single time,” as our founder, Michael Smit, says.
Every Aspect of SEO needs to be in order
SEO is much more than only content writing, there are multiple factors that contribute to a great SEO strategy such as On-page and Off-Page SEO, Locational SEO and Technical SEO. A proper SEO company needs to deliver on all of these factors. Some of the major SEO factors include:
On-Page SEO
- Title Tags
- Meta Description
- Internal & External Links
- Image Alt Tags
- Content Structure
- Hyperlocal Optimization
Content Marketing
- Blog Posts
- Time Spent on Site
- Social Media Follows & Shares
- Videos & Audio
- Infographics
- eBooks
Off-Page SEO
- Backlinking
- Social Listening
- Social Signals
What are the 3 types of SEO services that the company provides In South Africa?
There are three types of SEO you need for a well-rounded organic search strategy: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. By breaking down your strategy and thinking about SEO as these three categories, it will be much easier to organize and execute your optimization plans.
Which SEO techniques are popular In South Africa?
To help keep you from constantly refreshing Google’s update page, we put together this list of the top 10 important SEO techniques.
Understand Your Site’s Core Web Vitals.
Optimize for Google Passage Ranking.
Focus on Featured Snippets.
Learn the EAT Principle.
Support Multiple Long-Tail Keyword Phrases.
Is SEO still relevantIn South Africa?
Old SEO techniques won’t work anymore, so as long as you move with the times and adapt your SEO strategy, it is still one of the most effective, long-term marketing tools there is. SEO still remains relevant and vital in 2024 if you want your business to have an effective online presence.