What is SEO, and how does it help a South African business?

What SEO means, in plain words

Google's own SEO starter guide describes SEO as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it. Being found only helps if the page someone lands on makes them want to call you.

Google finds sites without being asked. Its crawlers explore the web by themselves, following links from pages Google already knows and reading the sitemaps site owners submit. Google may then crawl the pages it finds, store what it understood in its index, and show a page when it matches someone's search. Not every page it finds is crawled or indexed. Google says so plainly. When someone searches, Google returns the results it believes are the most relevant and highest quality for that search.

So SEO is everything you do to make each of those steps go your way: pages Google can reach, the words your customers type, and a site good enough that Google would rather show it than the next result.

Where SEO can get you on Google

Say you're an electrician in Pietermaritzburg. This is a made-up example. When someone nearby searches for an electrician, your business can show up in different places on the same results page:

• the map results, which come from your Google Business Profile (our guide to local SEO for service businesses covers how they rank);
• the ordinary results, which come from your website;
• AI answers such as Google's AI Overviews, which our guide to what AI SEO is covers.

Ads sit around these, in sections Google marks as ads, and those places are paid for. The rest can't be bought. Google only sells ad space, so nobody can buy a better place in the ordinary results, and running ads with Google won't move your site in them either. The map is the same: there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. For the electrician, Google weighs how well the profile matches the search, how close the business is to the person searching, and how prominent it is. Google calls these relevance, distance and prominence.

How SEO helps your business

The gain is timing. Nobody has to be talked into needing an electrician. They've already searched. The work is making sure your business is among the answers, and that your page gives them a reason to choose you over the next name on the list.

SEO can't fix what happens after the click. If nobody answers the phone, or the page doesn't make the next step obvious, more visitors won't turn into more work. Our post on what a landing page is covers that side.

Is SEO worth it for a small business?

It's worth it when people search for what you sell, in the area you serve, and you can handle more enquiries when they come.

You can check the first yourself. Type your service and your town into Google, watch what it suggests as you type, and look at who holds the first page: those are the businesses and sites you'd be up against. Google's results can change with where the person searching is, so search from the area you serve, or ask a customer there to search for you.

SEO isn't the right spend for everyone right now. Our SEO in South Africa page lists the honest reasons not to buy SEO yet: a brand-new domain with an urgent revenue gap, a service with no search demand, or a sales process that can't handle more enquiries. In those cases we'd rather say so, and tell you whether paid search would get you there faster.

Google warns against anyone who guarantees a top ranking, and our guide to how long SEO takes explains what decides the pace.

Can you do SEO yourself?

For a small local business, Google thinks you can. Its page on whether you need an SEO says you can probably do much of the work yourself, starting with its starter guide.

First, make sure Google can find you at all: a Business Profile if customers come to you or you travel to them, a website Google can index, and Search Console to show you what Google found. Our guide to getting your business on Google takes you through each step.

After that, most of the work is your pages and your reputation:

1. Write a page for each service yourself, from what you know. Google's starter guide says useful content is likely to do more for you than anything else it suggests, and asks for writing that's original, kept current and written for people. Put the words a customer would type in each page's title and main heading, as Google's key best practices advise.
2. Earn links and reviews. Google mainly finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled, often on other people's websites, and its local ranking help counts links to your business and your reviews towards how prominent you are on the map.

A professional earns their keep on the technical side and in the time you'd rather spend on the business. If you do hire, Google says a great time is when you're planning a new site or a redesign, and the earlier the better.

What a good SEO does, and the warning signs

Google's page on hiring an SEO lists what a useful SEO offers: a review of your site's content and structure, technical advice on things like hosting, redirects and error pages, content, keyword research, knowledge of your market, and optimising for generative AI.

The same page lists the warning signs. Be careful with anyone who:

• guarantees a top ranking, or claims a special relationship with Google or a "priority submit";
• emails you out of the blue to say your site isn't listed;
• won't explain what they're changing on your site;
• asks you to link to their website.

If an SEO offers to audit your site, Google suggests giving them read access to Search Console only at that stage. Ask what results they expect, in what timeframe, and how they'll measure success, and write the answer down. Keep your website, Business Profile, Search Console and analytics in your own name, with the agency given access.

How we approach SEO

Our groundwork is a technical audit, a Google Business Profile claim or clean-up, a citation audit, keyword and competitor mapping, and analytics that count enquiries rather than visits. Our SEO in South Africa page sets out the rest of the schedule and the questions to ask any agency, us included.

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