Search engines don't have ears or eyes. So everything about SEO hinges on the written word aka keywords. Keywords can come from a variety of places. One of the first places we check is with you. That's right, your years of experience helping customers means you’ve heard the words customers think of when they're looking for you. Hello do you sell “X” or I need “Y”. Those words and phrases are your golden keywords. Another excellent place is online, specifically your competitors. We call it industry research. After that there's forums and online sales portals.

This research gets captured and analyzed and from it we pick the words you are most likely to get buyer specific traffic from.

With thousands of sites using manufactured backlinks to increase their backlinks profiles you would be forgiven for wanting to jump on the band wagon and score a quick buck. However we do not suggest this strategy for backlink building.

Our backlink strategy is founded on creativity and public relations. So instead of leaving loads of cut and paste comments on blogs all over the world with links pointing back to your website we research your industries opinion leaders and then create website content that contributes.

The rewards for doing it this way is that Google gives genuine backlinks higher rankings. Not only does Google reward you, but the website that gave you the link could potentially reach out and collaborate with you again.

Domain Authority is seldom whats standing between you and your local audience. But in the rare case when it is then the solution requires a long term focused approach.

Website content is the first place we look. How thin is your content. How well does it rank. What’s it going to take to build it up. These questions and more are addressed and a strategy is put in place to handle a low domain authority.

You may be up against a website with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of indexed keywords. This boils down to a lack of content on your website. However we’re not just looking at creating tons of content.

We’re looking at creating industry specific content. Your competitor may have thousands of keywords but this vanity metric may not actually be what you are up against, we dig deeper and find out which content is ranking him ahead of you for your desired keywords. Then we create something that adds more value and of course contains the same keywords. We then submit that for re-indexing and monitor ranking changes.

This is a key metric. Google ranks popular sites because of the fact that they are popular. In the rare situation where you are up against a website that has many thousands of visitors a month then you will need a strong focused content building strategy. For example companies like Makro and Builders Warehouse average around a million site visitors a month.

However the vast majority of businesses do not have this problem. Typically a strong local competitor has between 5000 to 10 000 visitors a month.

5000 to 10000 visitors a month is not an impossible goal. We use a step by step approach to analyze what it is that makes that website so appealing and then we create strategies to out create them. Answering the questions your industries audience has in a way that adds more value to their experience.

It’s not always a given that high CPC keywords are hard to rank for. There are many industries that have very poor SEO who instead of handling their websites ranking problem, opt instead to advertise their way to the top.

This leads to bidding wars which in turn creates a high CPC. A classic example of poor SEO industries is the maintenance and repair sector. Very often this leaves the door wide open to quietly get your SEO done and rank at position #1 for free while the rest of the industry pay R80 or R90 a click, some industries even go up to R800 and more for a single click. (Not conversion to sale, just a click into the website)

None the less a high CPC may not be the result of a poorly optimized industry, we dig in and find out what's fueling that ad spend and come up with solutions.

You'v probably heard of UX (User Experience) design. When it comes to ranking organically the importance of designing for your visitor can not be understated. This single facet is where the real power of SEO lies.

Designing a website for your site visitors can be as simple as making small changes here and there or a complete overhaul.

The company with the best brand strategy is invariably the one who grows the biggest and survives the longest.

Everyone can have a Brand strategy. The smaller you are the easier it is. Unlike an ad campaign which says we’re going to use this slogan with that picture and promote it across X Y Z platforms. Brand strategy digs into what sits behind your ad campaigns. The real (unadvertised) reasons you're doing what you’re doing.

It gets pretty specific, but in the process of answering the hard questions (like what your real budget is and what are your real income goals) It gets you to think past your barriers. A brand strategy can be a once off process or an annual event. Better still the results are often numerous and immeasurably rewarding. Filtering as they do into every aspect of your business in ways you never imagined.

SEO without a brand strategy leaves you with 360 degrees worth of directions to go in. Scratching for customers in every nook and cranny. But never with enough focus to really make a real impact. Stretched thin. But get that brand strategy done and suddenly your full focus and attention is set in one direction. Eliminating the costs that come from misaligned activities and spring boarding your success exponentially.

The easiest way to define metadata is that it’s coding meant only for browsers and search engines. So we as site visitors don’t see the meta data unless we look at the source code. But this doesn’t mean that it’s not important.

Meta Data is Vital to SEO

The first example of meta data that we’ll look at are your page titles.

Most of us have pages called Home, Services, About and Contact – we see these pages in our sites menu. But page titles are also what we see in our search results.

And when it comes to clicking a search result the chances of a customer clicking ‘Home Page’ is way less than if the search result said. Best Prices on Desk Fans. Especially if you’re a company that sells desk fans.

The second piece of meta data we’ll look at is your meta description. This little snippet of code is the description under the search results page title.

As an example think of a time when you Googled something and the results you saw didn't make sense. Lets say you googled how to cook a steak and the results that came up were "JOE BLOGS Category Results Farm Fresh".

Nothing about that text indicates that you're going to find information about how to cook a steak.

That's because the site in question had no meta description and Google had pulled the first lines of text from the page into the search results.

Fortunately we see less of this these days. There’s two reasons. First most websites have discovered the importance of a meta description that makes sense and second Google has improved it's search algorithm so that text that you typed in matches the search results.

These are just two key pieces of meta data, but there are others.  Each playing a part in the ranking and conversion journey.

Page speed is a key ingredient in ranking. However the main factor that slows down page speed is the coding. The bigger your website and the more features and effects you have, the more coding there is behind the scenes and the longer it takes for the site to load.

The ideal solution is to have your website custom developed so that every line of code is absolutely essential with not a single line extra. Unfortunately the development costs to do this would make it uneconomical for the majority of business owners. Not only that but each and every change needed thereafter would need to be custom developed. The next best solution is to install a plugin that minimizes the code.

Doing it this way ensures that you are able to build and modify your website at an affordable cost and then based on a range of settings this additional plugin converts the code down to it's smallest size. The better you set it up the less likely it is to break the sites functionality.

After cleaning up the code the next job is to make sure that resources needed, specifically images, are as small as possible. This requires compressing each individual image to it's smallest size without losing resolution.

Once these two main areas are resolved there is also the option of upgrading ones hosting platform from shared to dedicated hosting, but bear in mind that doing that carries an additional cost.