Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

It’s a wonderful thing to have a beautiful website. It’s even better to have one that’s easy to navigate and gives your customers the quality content they’re looking for.

But great aesthetics, strong sales messages and fabulous functionality count for little if your prospects can’t find your site in the first place. If this is a concern for you, we'd be delighted to conduct a free SEO audit on your website, so do please drop us a mail.

With up to 90% of web visitors coming from search engines, it would be foolhardy not to invest a substantial portion of your marketing effort into boosting search engine visibility. Few areas of their broader online activity will deliver a stronger return on investment. Yet few companies seem to have woken up to this.

There are two distinct strategies that can be used to boost the quantity and quality of a website’s traffic. There’s organic search engine optimisation - which focuses on building a site’s relevance and credibility thus making it more attractive to the algorithms used by Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other major search operators when determining where to rank a website; and there’s search engine marketing which centres on advertising through pay-per-click programmes such as Google AdWords.

The two strategies employ completely different tactics and can, in many ways, be compared to the broader publishing industry.

Organic SEO

Achieving an organic search engine listing is rather like getting editorial coverage in a newspaper. You need to convince the journalist that you merit being featured in his publication. It takes a fair amount of effort, but the result is worth it as readers will view the ensuring editorial endorsement as having substantial credibility. This increases the likelihood of them taking an action – which will hopefully be to make contact with you.

Good organic SEO does exactly the same thing. It convinces a search engine that your website is relevant to a specific query. A top listing is the equivalent of securing a decent piece of press coverage.

In much the same way that PR consultancies exist to help companies secure media coverage, so SEO consultants are here to help you gain top search engine rankings. And good advice really is worth its weight in gold.

Search engine marketing

Placing an advert is a much easier way of obtaining brand visibility as it provides you with much more control of your message and the outcome.

Returning to the publishing analogy, if you don’t have a story, you won’t get editorial coverage. Maybe you need your message to appear more speedily than the editorial process allows, or in a specific part of the publication.

GoogleAds works in much the same way as a conventional print or broadcast ad. It may not carry the same credibility as an organic search return or piece of editorial coverage, but by paying for an advert you have control over how frequently it appears, where it appears and what it says.

2Stroke is a Cape Town SEO company which provides its clients with both paid SEM and organic search engine optimisation services.  While many of our clients are based in South Africa, we also provide SEO services to companies in France, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA.