Suburb, not city
Buyers search by suburb. One city page does not cover them, and the businesses that rank are the ones that wrote a page for each area they genuinely serve rather than listing thirty in a footer.
SEO services in South Africa
South African search results reward businesses that have written properly about what they do in the suburb they serve. Metro areas are large and fragmented, so a single page covering Johannesburg is competing with pages written specifically about Sandton, Randburg and Midrand, and losing to all of them.
Connection speed and data cost also shape what works. A page heavy with sliders and video is a page a lot of buyers will not wait for, and the fix is usually the cheapest work on the list.
What is different about search in South Africa
Page weight is a conversion problem
Mobile data is expensive and connections vary. Cutting page weight is one of the few pieces of SEO work that shows up in enquiries almost immediately.
The profile does the local work
Categories, services, hours and photographs on a Google Business Profile decide the map pack, and most competitors set theirs up once and never touched it again.
What the work covers
- Local SEO. Map pack, Google Business Profile, citations and location pages, so somebody searching nearby calls you rather than the next name on the list.
- Technical SEO. Crawl errors, speed, indexing, structured data and safe migrations, so the pages that win you work can be found and are not slow enough to lose the visit.
- On-page SEO. Titles, headings, internal links and page copy written around what a buyer is actually trying to do, not around a keyword.
- Content writing. Service pages and articles researched from the search results, written by people, edited for accuracy. Written to be quoted by an AI assistant as well as read by a person.
- Link building. Links earned from relevant sites through outreach and guest content. No networks, no bought placements.
- SEO audits. A full read of your site with every issue ordered by what it is costing you in lost enquiries.
- White-label SEO. The same work delivered under your agency’s name, with reports you can forward as your own.
- WordPress development. Fast, secure WordPress builds and fixes for the sites we optimize.
There is no package to pick from. What the site needs is decided on a call and written down before any work starts. The SEO services page explains what a month covers.
Individual services in South Africa
Each of these has its own page for this market, because the work and the search behaviour are both different here.
Where this usually starts in South Africa
These are the sectors where the pattern is clearest: a fixed catchment, a list of services people search for by name, and competitors who have not written a page for any of them.
Results from real clients
Every number below is from the client’s own Google Search Console, for the period shown. Impressions are how often the site appeared; clicks are people who arrived. What each visit is worth is your sales process, not ours, so these are the visits we can prove rather than a conversion figure we cannot.
- 52,993clicksUp and Running Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 1 Mar 2023 to 14 Mar 2024
- Impressions
- 2,238,155
- CTR
- 2.4%
- Avg. position
- 13.49
+139,355% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
- 12,285clicksBackcountry Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 6 Jul 2023 to 31 May 2024
- Impressions
- 601,822
- CTR
- 2.0%
- Avg. position
- 19.3
+2,059% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
- 7,630clicksYour Place Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
- Impressions
- 284,589
- CTR
- 2.7%
- Avg. position
- 15.66
+1,184% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
- 6,816clicksPeak EndurancePerformance and physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
- Impressions
- 482,378
- CTR
- 1.4%
- Avg. position
- 16.16
+1,174% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
Questions about SEO in South Africa
Do you publish South African client results?
Only results that can be verified from a client’s own Search Console report are published anywhere on this site, and the ones shown come from other markets. Nothing is estimated or illustrative.
Do you work in rand?
Quoting is handled on the call. No prices are published on this site because the right scope depends on the market and on how much the site needs fixing first.
Which comes first, the site or the profile?
Usually the profile, because it moves fastest and costs least. The site work runs alongside it.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.