I have a conversation two or three times a month that goes the same way every time.
A business owner tells me they already have a website. I ask how many customers it brought them last year. There is a pause. Then some version of the same answer: none that they know of. They were sold half of something and told it was the whole thing.
A website on its own is a house in the middle of a field
Picture the nicest house you have seen this year. Now put it in the middle of an open field, an hour outside town, with no road running to it.
It is still a beautiful house. The kitchen is still lovely. And nobody will ever knock on the door, because there is no way to arrive. The only people who will ever set foot inside are the ones you personally drive there yourself.
That is what a website without search is. It is a destination with no route to it. Every visitor has to be delivered by you, from your Instagram, your WhatsApp, your business card, your own mouth. The site is not finding anyone. You are finding them, and then showing them the site.
SEO is the road.
It is the part that means somebody who has never heard of you, who is looking for exactly what you sell, at the moment they need it, arrives at your door without you doing anything that day. That is the entire point. And it is the part almost nobody includes.
Why it keeps happening
A website is a project. It has a start, an end, a deliverable and an invoice. You can scope it, build it, hand it over, and move on to the next one. Search is not a project. It is a programme that runs for months; it is harder to sell, it is harder to explain.
So the industry sells what is easy to sell. The client, who has never been told there is a second half, assumes the site will do the finding. Six months pass. Nothing arrives. The owner concludes that online marketing does not work for a business like theirs, and goes back to referrals.
They were not wrong about what they experienced. They were wrong about the cause.
The order is backwards
Here is the part I would change about how this whole industry works.
Almost every website in South Africa is built first and thought about second. Someone decides on the design, the colours, the pages, the wording, and only afterwards does anyone ask how people are supposed to find it. Often nobody asks at all.
We do it the other way around, and I would say this even if it were not what we sell.
Before anything gets designed, find out what people in your area actually type into Google when they need what you do. Not what you call it. What they call it. Find out how many of them there are every month. Then work out what one of those customers is worth to you.
Now you have a number. Not a feeling, not a hope. A rand figure for the demand sitting in your town right now that you are not capturing.
That number should exist before you spend a cent on design, because it tells you two things. It tells you whether this is worth doing at all, which for some businesses it honestly is not. And if it is worth doing, it tells you exactly what the site needs to contain, because every page now exists for a reason instead of because the template had a slot for it.
What to ask before you pay anyone
If you are about to commission a website, ask three questions.
Ask what people search for to find a business like yours, and how many of them there are each month. If the answer is vague, they have not looked.
Ask which pages will exist and why each one exists. "Services" as a single page is a bad sign. Each thing you sell should have a page, because that is how someone searching for that one thing finds you.
Ask what happens after launch. If the answer is nothing, you are buying a house in a field. That may be fine, if you know that is what you are buying and you have another way of getting people there. It is only a problem when nobody tells you.
The part that actually matters
None of this is complicated and none of it is a secret. It is just rarely said out loud.
A website is worth having. It is simply not a marketing strategy on its own, any more than a shopfront is a marketing strategy. It is where people arrive. Something still has to bring them.
Build the house, by all means. Just budget for the road.
