The Secret to Our Success With SA Entrepreneurs

What information are they interested in and how do you keep them coming back to your website? Today we’re letting you in on how we answered some of these questions and increased our website traffic. The SME South Africa website currently has 70K unique monthly visitors, with an average of 1,2K downloads (resources) every month and 25K email subscribers in our database. How do we achieve these types of numbers? 

We have managed to build a robust community who come to us to help them with some of their biggest business questions. What many don't know is that most of our new fans first find our website through organic Google Search. Because of this, we had to be intentional about implementing SEO strategically on our website. The official definition of SEO is as follows: the process of growing the quality and quantity of (organic) website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. The key to all this is you have to know what entrepreneurs are searching for. 

An effective SEO strategy has helped SME SA to:- Grow our traffic and community substantially.  - Find out exactly what information our entrepreneurs are looking for and where the knowledge gaps are. - Build credibility for the SME SA brand.- Stay ahead of our competitors.

Here is how our SEO strategy helps us get into the mindset of South African entrepreneurs - and how you can do the same too: 

Lesson #1. Find out what SMEs and entrepreneurs are searching for online

Regularly, we keep an eye on what SMEs are searching for online and keep tabs on what search terms our site ranks high for. According to Google Console, our top performing- and top growing pages on our site in the past several weeks are:

1. The Basics of How to Register a Small Business in South Africa

2. Licensing and Permits for the Food Industry

3. Where to Access Funding for Women-Owned Businesses in South Africa

4. Funding Opportunities: A List of Investors That Back SA Startups

5. How Takealot Became SA’s Best Online Retailer

6. What You Need to Know About NYDA Grants

7. South African Tech Startups that Disrupted 2019

8. Local Small Businesses Worth Supporting

Our top growing- and performing search queries (keywords) include:

• How to register a small business in South Africa

• Takealot transient competitive advantage

• Rabbit farming

• Startups South Africa

• How to start a business

• NYDA

• Funding

• SMMEs that provide food drinks and snacks

• Crowdfunding South Africa

• Government funding for small business

• Telkom Covid-19 payment relief

Lesson #2. Create valuable content

Because we know what people are searching for online, we can create and publish content that will continuously drive people to our website. Take a look at this example: For Women's Month 2020 our coverage focused on one of our most popular topics: Women entrepreneurs and funding. The performance of the campaign and reader engagement across all our platforms was proof that we had published content that entrepreneurs found relevant to them. 

Lesson #3. Collaborate with relevant partners to provide even more value

With the insight we have on the entrepreneur audience, we can use the same insights to execute some pretty exciting campaigns with some of our partner brands.

During the past several months, we’ve done partnerships with the likes of:

• Nedbank - We rolled out a Women’s Month series called ‘Breaking the Funding Glass Ceiling’, sponsored by Nedbank (See HERE), which unpacked the funding challenges women entrepreneurs continue to face and explored the innovative ways women entrepreneurs are financing their businesses. 

• Vodacom Financial Services – Vodacom Financial Services shared with our audience their business funding solution, Vodalend, which allowed entrepreneurs to get quick access online to funding and other benefits.

• The North-West University – We assisted the organisation in calling on SME owners and their employees to participate in a qualitative SME study which focuses on the interactions between leaders in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and their employees and among SME employees.

Which of these strategies would you be keen to implement? We would love to know! If you’d like to partner with us on our next project(s), you’re welcome to email our Digital Account Manager, Tasha Mchunu, at [email protected] or call her on 011 704 2641.