Search Engine Optimization In Kenya: A Beginner's Guide
The bitter truth: The majority of Kenyan businesses lack a reverential digital presence.
Much of their online strategies are quixotic, muddled and poorly thought out. And this is costing them badly!
While it is common knowledge that a business’s online presence is a critical determinant of its success in the present digital age, most Kenyan businesses are yet to grasp this simple yet fundamental concept.….
One Saturday noon after a grueling morning working on my desk, I took a stroll out for some fresh air. It stroked my mind to ask my friend Fred whom I stumbled upon how his recently launched business was doing. Based on how passionately he spoke, I’d tell that he was really working hard and he was looking up to a promising future. One of the things that he spoke so fondly of as his biggest success drivers was his company website. He had spent quite much to put it up and much more to keep it running.
As an afterthought, I happened to ask him for the site’s address to have a look at what he so much praised later when I'd return to the house. He gladly handed me his business card on which his web's address was prominently displayed.
Later on upon viewing the website, I did not feel compelled enough that what I was staring at was what was to bring Fred’s “highly anticipated breakthrough.”
I had hoped, based on the zeal with which he had spoken, to bump unto a vibrant and well-optimized company website, but to my dismay, it was of such low quality.
Yes, it did have the basic structure of a standard website. The design was top-notch, the color scheme amazing, functional features (general site usability and navigability aspects) wonderful, but it was nowhere near what would earn a good ranking as well as attract prospects and leads.??
Triggered by Fred’s case, I decided to embark on a simple research process to determine the quality of a couple of websites of major Kenyan brands, and as I had suspected, most seemed to be suffering the same disease as Fred’s —pitiful and low grade.
At this point, I was convinced enough that most business owners do not understand the benefits of a formidable digital presence and those that have a gist of it don’t really have an idea how to harness the underlying benefits to their advantage. Either way, the impacts on the business would be the same—catastrophic.
As a result most companies end up using their websites as mere storefront windows—to simply get some kind of online presence, nothing more.?
With the massive spread of the internet of things (IoT) and digital systems in our daily lives, a well-calculated online presence is a critical necessity for businesses.?
Imagine…..
A guy, let's call him client Y, who is based in London and has never been to Africa, wants to visit Kenya as a tourist.
Before thinking about anything, he does what everybody else does—conducts some light internet research before making a decision.?
Company A specializes in tour services. It is a big brand and is well known locally for its exemplary services. The problem is that it has a poor web presence, meaning it ranks lowly on the internet and hardly appears in web searches.?
Company B is not as prominent, but its web positioning is superb.?
The chances are high that client Y will overlook company A despite the fact that it is exactly what he would need. This is because it fails to show up when he keys on the browser key phrases say "best tour companies in Kenya." Instead, he will end up engaging company B (with inferior services) because it shows in the searches and ranks better on the internet.?
For perspective, think about how many prospective tourists similar to client Y spread across places in the world would be seeking company A's services at any given time? By simply missing in those critical searches, company A loses all those prospects. Add to this the forgone benefits of electronic word of mouth (eWOM).?
Consider this…
If client Y decides to engage company B and it somehow meets his expectations, the chances are that he will recommend it to other people. In other words, he will spread information about the company to other potential customers on the internet (on review pages, social media sites etc). The sharing of information on products and services of brands and firms via such internet based means by consumers is what eWOM entails.?Basically eWOM enhances peer-to-peer brand awareness and visibility leading to a broader reach. The best thing about eWOM is that it build trust because people tend to believe information from fellow consumers more.
By failing to rank well on the internet, company A (despite being a major brand) ends up losing a potential client. It doesn’t end there though. It also loses the benefits of electronic referrals or eWOM.?
How Kenyan Companies Do It Wrong?
Using “key phrase searches,” any random internet user would expect the websites of major brands or companies (in their various industries or areas of specialization) to show up on the first or, worse, the second pages of Google. For instance, in the health sector, one would expect industry giants like Nairobi hospital to at least appear on the search engine's first page when you search certain keyword combinations such as “best hospitals in Kenya,” “top Kenyan hospitals,” or “leading hospitals in Kenya.”
In the tourism sector, you’d expect major operators like bonfire safaris to be among the top-ranking searches.
Among hotels and lodges, some globally renowned brands, including those that have been constantly awarded for astounding performance, such as Sirikoi and Mahali Mzuri lodges, would be expected to rank highly. But interestingly, they all lack a commandeering digital presence. At face value, this might sound like a small issue, but in reality, its impacts on a business can be egregious.
The Exact Reasons For Low Ranking
As a search engine, Google’s primary role is to give users what they want— that is, to give them the most relevant and useful information there could be upon conducting searches. Like any other business, Google wants to give its users (seekers of information) top value. To do so, Google uses crawling algorithms which ideally search billions of websites to analyze the information they have before arranging them in order of usefulness to be availed to the user through a process called indexing and ranking.
In simple terms, think of crawlers as robotic technicians (bots) in a huge library where billions and billions of books on various subjects are placed on shelves. When a user asks for a book (s) within a given subject area by the use of a search query, the crawlers have to use the information to peruse their catalog and suggest the sources with the most relevant information. Those sources had already been pulled, assessed, and the findings stored in the catalog for ease of retrieval. Thus, upon request, the bots will determine which books will be shown first based on the information they have and whether it meets the user’s needs. At the same time, bots keep on searching through the library every so often to determine if new book supplies have updated nad relevant information within the various subject areas worthy of being indexed.
But sometimes, there could be too much information to go through in so little time (though users expect almost instant feedback). Moreover, crawlers do not want to scour your site for long, interfering with its performance in the process. Therefore, bots will compute a crawling capacity limit or a budget (resources and time) to spend assessing a given site.
Because of a limited budget against such huge information bases to review, crawlers may employ an expenditure rule to ensure they only spend their resources on what matters the most. Like any rational human faced with resource constraints, they too have to economize. In other words, they will not spend their expensive budget on sites they have problems accessing or on irrelevant and low-quality pages. In case they do, those sites may be indexed but not get ranked, but sometimes they may be ranked poorly, in which case it is as good as not being ranked because what is the need to appear on Google’s 40th or 50th page? The furthest an average internet user would go is perhaps the second or third pages.??
To ensure that a site is properly indexed and ranked, it is therefore important to make it crawlable, which includes working on on-site aspects (on-site SEO) and off-site and technical factors.
Because there may be too much information to go through, crawlers rely on signals within web graphs to determine what pages to spend their budget on. While there are many factors that influence this process, two majorly stand out: site popularity and the site’s number of external referrals or back links. These two take us back to on-site and off-site SEO factors.
Therefore, the reason most Kenyan websites are performing lowly in terms of ranking is: that they either do not adhere to search engine crawlability rules at all or partly follow them.
What exactly are the impacts?
Firstly, here are some interesting statistics to think about
The implications of these realities for businesses are:
Of what use is good web ranking?
And what is there to do to attain good ranking and enjoy the related benefits?
Two things: Just make your website suitable for
1. humans (as in, write human friendly content)
2. crawlers or machines (as in, structure the content in a way
that makes it easier for Google bots to crawl through for indexing)
While crawling upon a page, there are?many factors?that the bots look at in determining how high a site should rank, but the following are among the major ones:
On-page SEO (anything done on the website to improve ranking and user experience). This includes a number of aspects as:
1.Content quality?
What this simply means is coming up with ways of making your site’s content valuable for its intended users. You may also need to make it crawlable by adhering to the following rules.
After landing on a site or a page, crawlers check the title, headings and meta tags first; therefore, to optimize the crawling budget, make it easy for the bots by ensuring that you:?
Most importantly ensure the content is:
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a. Useful and well researched?
b. Comprehensive
c. Accurate and fresh or up to date
d. Easy to read
Videos not only engage users more, but they stick longer in people’s memories. In fact, some findings have suggested that videos are?12 times more engaging?than any other content. Combining them with killer text creates super interactive content for brand awareness, lead attraction and possible prospect conversion.?
2.Site/page navigability?
Site navigability affects user experience, which is a critical ranking factor. A good site structure makes it easier for users to get the information they need. Employ mechanics that make movement on the site and information acquisition simple, easy and fast. For example, avoid complex drop-down menus, and employ such techniques as the three click rule as used in this online shopping site to allow users easily get to the information they need.
3. User experience?
Even Google stresses this as an?important ranking factor. It entails aspects that make it easier for users to access information on your site and includes:
Obviously, page load speed has a direct bearing on customer or user experience. The longer you keep a user waiting, the higher the chances they will bounce back. Aspects of page loading speed are many such as??Largest Contentful Paint?(LCP) which refers to the render time of the largest text or image that becomes visible to the user when the page starts to load. Google’s gold standards are that LCP be 2.5seconds or less.
There is also?First Input Delay?(FID) which refers to the time from when a user first interacts with a page ( such as when they click a link) to when the site responds to that interaction or query. Google’s gold standards require an FID of 100 milliseconds or less. The trick is to conduct a page speed audit and work on issues to do with the browser, content, web hosting provider, and user device. For instance, if you make the page fast for mobiles, yet only 10% of your target clients use mobile phones to access the site, your primary segment (90%) who use desktops will be left out. Know your users and design your site with them in mind.
4. Page internal link structure?
Links are what make up the web graphs that bots use as paths to crawl through sites. If a site’s link structure is properly designed, crawlers find it easier to go crawl through and have it indexed and ranked. Moreover, links connect pages making it easier to discover relatable content. This way, they ensure users can move from general to more specific content. Link structures entail aspects such as breadcrumbs, anchor texts, outbound links, among many others.
Employ best practices in designing the internal link structure, such as avoiding broken links, inserting key phrases on anchor texts and escalating those pages that have high converts. Also, adding value to the user experience by linking your site’s content to authoritative external sources could help crawlers give you more visibility, especially if outbound link anchor texts are related to the content with which they link out to. But links should not be overused to prevent diluting a site’s main content.?
5. Site or page Freshness?
Google likes to give its users up-to-date information, a reason for which they have developed a “freshness algorithm.” This means putting new or fresh content on your website may help it rank better. But what exactly is “fresh content ?” Google uses three parameters to define what crawlers will rate as fresh:
i. Recent events such as the death of a global leader, a coup, a natural calamity etc.
ii. Regularly recurring events such as quarterly reports of multinationals, sports results and more.
iii. Frequent updates such as weather, technology and more.
iv. Other aspects of freshness include product queries, breaking and news queries.?
The question then would be, to what extent should one modify old content to make it influence web ranking? Google proposes what they call “relatively large amount of content” changes or modifications as being able to cause a difference in ranking. But it goes a step ahead of just new content. The basic rules of quality as a ranking factor would still apply meaning while making updates; it is good to ensure relevance and value. This also means updating things here and there alone won’t enhance ranking. The focus should always be on offering the best, well-researched, up-to-date, high-quality content.
6.Off-Page SEO
This majorly refers to out-of-site factors you’d do to improve site ranking, such as?link building?and content marketing.??
To optimize your on-site and off-site strategies in a bid to improve your sites positioning, you have to bring in a third aspect: understand user behavior while online, more so in relation to how they engage with content.?
People don’t just visit websites and click links anyhow. They have a certain behavioral pattern that they tend to employ when they seek and engage with information on the internet.
Normally, two things happen when the average internet user visits a website.?
Firstly, they click the site and, within 8 seconds, scan through to decide whether or not to continue engaging with the information.?
If the information is relevant and valuable enough, they may delve deeper, which may make them respond to your call to action.In other words, the user has less than one minute to decide whether or not to engage with your content which is why you should strive to make it attractive so as to grab their concentration as fast as would be possible.?
When reading articles, for instance, internet users tend to like scannable content.This mostly is about content structure — that is, paragraph design, length of sentences and general appearance.?
Reading online/on-screen is totally different from reading on print/ paper.?If anything, internet readers tend to have a short concentration span. This is majorly due to the many distractions there tend to be in the digital ecosystem, plus aspects of technology used may cause body disturbance such as eye strain from screen lights, thereby interfering with concentration.
Therefore, most online readers tend to scan rather than read line by line. For this reason, users want content that will give them the most information in the shortest time possible. Content that is easy to read, straight to the point and visually appealing.
This calls for a need to make content less blocky, sentences and paragraphs brief and less crowded and the text clear and concise.
Scannable content is not only easy to read, but it is the most suitable to grab the reader’s attention as fast as possible.
Forbes?defines scannable content as:
content?that is short, sweet and to the point. Sentences and paragraphs are brief. Bold text and bullet points highlight key points. Links to other content are used to provide your readers with supplemental information.
To make your content scannable:?
For instance, when people read on screens (especially phone and tablet screens which are what the majority use to access the internet), they tend to use the F approach.
What this means is, readers, focus on the top horizontal area of your content (Titles, subtitles, first paragraph and top headings)
Further down, they apply a shorter horizontal movement ( reading text left-right)
Lastly, they apply a vertical movement or a slow downward scroll, scanning for visually catchy things there could be.
Diagrammatic representation of the F reading approach
This process occurs very fast (in less than a minute) before they decide to engage further with your content and respond to your call to action.
What this means is that if your titles, subheadings and headings are top-notch and the first few paragraphs informative and useful, you are most likely going to grab your readers’ attention. If they are crappy, it may not really matter what the other section has; the reader will turn right back and go straight to Twitter and TikTok, and that’s how you’ll lose a prospect.?
Scannable contents follow the “news article” technique where instead of beginning with lengthy details and definitions, they start off with conclusions, then details follow. In other words, start with the most important facts. Make the introduction scenic and let it summarize the primary points in a clear and concise manner.
It should be noted thaty SEO strategies can be categorized based on industry, with tailored techniques for sectors such as e-commerce or Online shopping, legal, healthcare, and more. Each industry has its own unique challenges and opportunities, requiring specialized techniques to enhance online visibility, drive targeted traffic, and achieve corprorate objectives. It is importnat that SEO specialists understand the specific needs and nuances of the different industries they are experts in to ensure that the strategies they curate are customized to optimize websites, improve search engine rankings, and maximize organic traffic for businesses operating in diverse sectors.
In conclusion, web ranking is a critical aspect of your digital presence. When done right, there is immense leverage to harness; however, when approached haphazardly, there would be a heavy price to pay. It is a complex phenomenon involving many things whose success may not employ a one size fits all kind of approach. The trick is to find out what works for you and double down on it.
Are you struggling to build an astounding digital reputation to ensure your brand develops the appropriate recognition? Worry no more. I advise businesses and individuals how to improve their organic ranking. I help companies turn their digital presence into tangible monetized results through best practices in SEO, digital marketing and content creation.?