|
JOIN OUR MAILING LIST |
|
Newsletter / Blog 2015-03-21 SEO “Cape Town Web Designers” The list of web designers operating in Cape Town is endless. Just do a Google search or ask on Facebook for a web designer. You will have an endless supply of suggestions in no time. There are even web designer’s directories popping up. So how does one go about choosing a web designer? I would like Buddy Web Design to be chosen every time of course! Questions which should be asked should include:
“Cape Town Web Designers” is probably the most wanted search term by Buddy Web Design and other Web Design Agencies operating in Cape Town. The only other industry so fiercely contested in Cape Town is the tourism industry. Individual establishments in the tourism industry are forced to join tourism directories. The same is happening with the web design industry with websites such as web compare where people looking for web designers can fill out a form and receive multiple quotes from web design companies simultaneously. A web design client from Pretoria recently emailed me a PDF report of a website audit done with Woorank. Woorank is a website which analyzes the overall performance of your website and you have the advanced option to compare your performance with that of your competitors in the industry. I have always wondered why my competitors outperform me while I write at least a monthly newsletter, have written a website marketing manual aimed at our typical clients. I have really taken the task of good quality content on my website by heart. While there is more than 200 factors which search engines considers one of them is back links. Back links are links from other websites to your website and works like recommendation letters. The Woorank tool gave me the opportunity to have a look at other web design companies in Cape Town and those who do better than Buddy Web Design on search and it was a mix of a shock, surprise and disappointment to see just how many back links those companies have. Web Design Company A – 990,000 Bearing in mind that most web design companies or agencies exists as either sole proprietors or husband and wife teams like Buddy Web Design. In the Southern Peninsula we know of at least two other husband and wife web design partnerships.( Ink Fish in Kalk Bay and Solid Web in Glencairn). Not one web design company offers exactly the same services. We for example offer Kwikwap Websites while most other web designers offers the Wordpress Platform. We are considering whether to include the Wordpress product offering to our stable of services. We recently had to refer a client to Solid Web because the client insisted on staying with their current host, M Web. It is really disappointing to see how many back links these top performing design agencies, top performing for the specific search term “Web Design Cape Town” have because it goes against everything we believe in ourselves and what we have been teaching our clients. “Focus on good quality content and the links will come naturally – other websites will link to you”. “Avoid black hat SEO like link farming or unnatural link building” Major search engine Google has indicated that they will penalise websites with low quality links coming to their websites, low quality letters of recommendation. Why is this not happening with Cape Town Web Design companies? The truth is probably that it is not limited to the web design industry but the whole search industry. It is difficult to implement a new major algorithmic update without considering all the factors. The one determining factor is will this benefit the clients of Google or at least it should be. For Google their client’s needs and wants should be the top priority. Of course their own profit purposes should also be taken into consideration. I have once again visited the Google Webmaster Forum and asked this question? Why the specific industry, Cape Town Web Designers, is not being penalised for link farming? Another web designer or SEO expert from Knysna first decided to rip into our own website with negative comment. Google Webmasters Forums can be an extremely rude place to visit. I have long since known that Web and Graphic designers are not the nicest people in the world when it comes to diplomacy and people skills. But I will take note of the negative critics on our own website and rectify what I can rectify. I met a new web design client in Kommetjie yesterday. The client owns a Yacht charter business in the Seychelles. The first thing I ensured is that they have a realistic expectation of what a website can do for them in terms of bringing in business trough organic search results. And so it should be for us as well. We should rather concern us with things which are under our control. Using the Woorank tool and the Webmaster Forum comments I will approach the programmers and developers at Kwikwap and ask that these matters be fixed as far is practical and possible starting with the most serious ones first. ( I am concerned with Google viewing some of my website content as duplication due to the Canonication issue – never mind about this heavy technical term. I do not understand it myself.) Fortunately we have back up from the Kwikwap technical team. I have put in a lot of effort into our own website while other Kwikwap consultants don’t even have their own website but use the main Kwikwap website as their public image. Not a bad idea considering the time involved in designing and maintaining a website , especially a website on web design in a fiercely contested geographical location such as Cape Town. Besides fixing the architectural issues of our software I could also go and consider what makes our product offering really stand out from the rest of the crowd. It is one thing to get a lot of website traffic. It is another to get the right website traffic which converts in business. By focussing on what makes us unique and ensuring that is focused on when considering our website text I could attract traffic which will turn into buying visitors. Our uniqueness is the following:
Besides correcting our own website copy and adjusting our expectations we will also consider alternatives to Search Engine Marketing to get new business. This is the best approach for people in very competitive industries like web design , seo or tourism. Each web design company in Cape Town has their own unique product offering. We cannot deliver on all the web design needs of companies in Cape Town. But we should aggressively target that part of the market for which we could definitely be the answer. |
