Think Co
Search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO services in South Africa

Built on the fundamentals.

Many of the websites that come to us are missing the basics a search engine reads first.

Our SEO starts there, then targets the terms your customers actually search, and carries on every month after that.
Enquire about SEO
Call 079 898 0734

Good SEO meets 6 basic standards

At a minimum, search engine optimisation should give every page a single H1 that names what it is about, aim each page at a term people actually search, keep your business details identical everywhere, put the technical layer a search engine reads in place, leave your Google Search Console in your own hands, and get the pages you want found into Google's index. Those 6 are the floor, not the finished job.

Each page should have a single H1 naming what it is about.

The H1 is the main heading, and search engines use it to work out what a page is for. It should name your service category, and your area if you serve a defined one. Several H1s, or a slogan in its place, weaken that signal.

Each page should target a term people actually search.

A page aimed at a phrase nobody types is found by nobody. Every page should have a main search term of its own, and no 2 pages on the site should compete for the same one, or both lose.

Your name, address and phone number should match everywhere.

Your website footer and your Google My Business (GMB) listing should carry the same name, address and phone number, letter for letter and number for number. Search engines use them to confirm that the site and the listing belong to the same business.

The technical layer should be in place.

A website can look finished and still be missing the parts only a search engine reads: a robots.txt file telling crawlers what they may visit, an Extensible Markup Language (XML) sitemap listing your pages, and schema markup stating what your business is. These are the first things skipped when a site is generated rather than built.

Your Google Search Console should belong to your business.

Search Console is Google's free record of the searches your website appeared for and the pages it has indexed. It should sit under your business's own Google account, so the record stays with you whoever does the work.

The pages you want found should be indexed.

A page Google has not indexed cannot rank, whatever is written on it. Every page you want customers to find should be in Google's index, and it is worth checking rather than assuming.
Every one of them can be checked by you, in a few minutes, with free tools. Each card tells you how. We would rather you verified this yourself than took our word for it, because the fastest way to find out whether your SEO is being done is to go and look.
How SEO actually works

SEO is ongoing work, not a job finished at launch

Search engine optimisation covers 3 things: the search terms you choose to compete for, the content on your pages that answers those searches, and the technical build underneath that decides what a search engine can read. It is not a heading and an address filled in once, and no single action does the job.

The fundamentals come first, because no strategy works on a site a search engine cannot read properly. After that, the work is refined month after month. There are short-term wins and long-term wins, both real, running on different clocks.

Nobody can honestly promise you a position on Google for a chosen term, and we do not. What we can show you is the work that was done and, on a site built properly, which terms it ranks for. We run the same method on this website first.
SEO and AI search

Artificial intelligence (AI) search results are built on the same work as standard SEO

Appearing inside an AI answer, such as Google's AI Overviews or ChatGPT, rests on the same work as standard search engine optimisation: clean page structure, direct answers, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and business details that match everywhere they appear. Google's own guidance for website owners says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in its AI features, and that the same foundational SEO practices apply.

What is Answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO)

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) are newer names for that work. Being quoted in an AI answer is a real outcome and is not measured the same way as a ranking, so it is worth building for. It is not a separate product to buy on top of SEO.

If a quote lists AEO or GEO as extra line items, ask which task on it is not already an SEO task.

The cost of SEO depends on 3 things

The cost of search engine optimisation in South Africa comes down to how competitive your search terms are, how much of the technical work has already been done, and how much content has to be written.
Those 3 are why 2 SEO quotes are rarely quoting the same job. Ask each supplier what the price includes. In this category a cheap quote often costs more in the end, because work that was not done properly has to be undone before it can be done again.

SEO questions we get asked

6 questions that come up in nearly every SEO conversation, answered before you have to ask them.

Search brings the visitor, and the rest of the system decides what happens next

Search engine optimisation brings people who are already looking for what you sell. On its own it brings the visit, not the enquiry. What happens after the click depends on a website built to turn a visit into an enquiry, social media that shows a first-time visitor you are still trading, and paid advertising that reaches people who have not searched yet.

Local SEO, meaning your map listing and your GMB profile, is its own piece of work and runs alongside this one. Think Co runs all of it in-house, from A to Z, so the pieces are planned together rather than handed between suppliers.

Think Co plans that system with the T-Method, which follows a customer through 4 stages: awareness, lead generation, conversion and retention. SEO is part of the awareness stage, where people first find you. Behind it sits the Interpretable Context Methodology (ICM), the method our own agency runs on.

Contact Us

SEO services in Johannesburg, South Africa

Think Co takes on SEO clients anywhere in South Africa, and the first step is a call. We will look at how your website is built today, tell you what we would fix first, and show you how you would check whether it worked.
079 898 0734
tevan@thinkco.co.za
11 Althea Street, Weltevreden Park, 1709, Gauteng, South Africa

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