SEO is critically important for your profitable affiliate marketing business but because I wanted to get the attention of prospective employers, I decided to do some digging into this question and looked at a few of the top ranked websites to help you find out who you should hire to get you consistent traffic from the search engines that convert into customers.

If an SEO company promise to give you top rankings in the search engines, run away for the time for gaming the system is over and rather focusing on engaging and converting a visitor to your site is where you should have your attention on. The traffic from search engines will come.

[box] Latest Update I’ve decided to move the updates to the top of the post and document the latest ranking update and other news.

05/09/2015 Its been a few months since I’ve last updated, this time its to announce the first day that this content received more traffic than all the other pages, including my home page which is traditionally the most trafficked.

So essentially this is what I think SEO is really all about. Creating valuable pieces of content that is useful to the person searching.

On a personal side, I’m now working with google adwords with this new digital marketing agency and I’m currently writing exams to be certified. It seems my attention is being drawn away from SEO for now.

20/05/2015. Spoke to the first digital agency that’s hiring and it looks positive. We may start with me working on a freelance bases as work become available. It looks like my dream job, wish me well.. Anyway, the last time I checked my webmasters tool is reporting that I’m ranking in the top 10 (which I don’t believe.) My SERP checker has got me at 33(local) & 31(global) as at 18 May 2015. More updates at the end of this post. Back to normal programming [/box]

I think that the keyword “SEO in South Africa” is going to be tougher to rank for in the future as their’ll be more websites competing to get traffic for it, with knowledge of how to rank highly more accessible to people there’ll be more than the 1 860 000 results in Google’s database. Anyway, I thought an interesting challenge I could set myself would be to rank this post on the SERPs and use this as a yardstick of my talents.

I’ve always had a laugh at those spam SEO emails from India and elsewhere that guarantee me first page rankings and I invariably ask them to tell me where they rank for the keyword “SEO” to prove to me they can do what they say, so here we are with me in the same boat. I’m hoping that the domain authority of my home page will help me rank for this keyword and generate traffic rather soon.

At this early stage, this page ranks nowhere and I’ll be updating this post at the conclusion of this paragraph with my ranking history. Please wish me luck or better still help out by either sharing this page to your favourite social media networks or leaving a comment below and adding to the discussion (this always helps the page get re-indexed more often by the spiders, I forgot exactly how again, erm….)

I did some quick keyword research on Jaaxy and afraid I didn’t come up with much, other than some ideas for future affiliate offers.

The tool is giving me more ideas on the “in South Africa” rather than the SEO part, but perhaps it could be an idea to divert some of that traffic via this site, that’s for a future project.

Bring my attention back to this one, here’s the jaaxy results:

Not much help with the long tail but it does give me a sense of the competition.

The competition, the top page of Google and the Top Organic Results

Starting with the ads and the first page of google has alot of them, as expected:

and then the organic results look are these:

To give this article it’s own angle, I’ve decided to give my own biased list of the top 5 companies to chose for your SEO. There’s also a more comprehensive list that you can check out but here are my favourite in no particular order, except my own:

1) Bryan Casson
Ok, I’m biased because I’ve met Bryan Casson before and writes interesting articles like this one keeping in touch with the local scene. He partners closely with Google and this man has got some skills I tell you. The big GOOG say’s so. Now on to the ads…

2) LeadsMachine is next because they seem to be a cool company to work for and I’m applying after I create this content, so please excuse my bias in all fairness they do seem to be producing good content, here’s a testimonial that’s posted to their YouTube channel, which seems to be of a happy customer, ja?

They’ve got a one pager on SEO for SMEs, their target market, which is required reading if you’re going to do SEO yourself (which is surprisingly not that difficult really). If you do it right, what you’re paying for is someone else just the time it is to manage the whole process that you’d sacrifice for doing in your own business.

What’s your time worth to you?

3) SEOStudio because they offer an affiliate system and while I don’t necessarily agree with what I think is the method that Rohan uses to get rankings, its his own proprietary link network (I think that when Google catches on to that, it may manually penalise all those sites) it does have a guarantee (disclosed when you get in touch, and so he seems pretty confident of his abilities.

At R5,000 a month, this promises immediate (withing the first month) results and there’s no contracts. If you see results within the first month, you can continue the good relationship. Use my affiliate link, http://seostudio.co.za/?ref=45, I earn a portion of the income (without costing you anything extra) and everyone’s happy.

What I like about this company is the level of transparency, you can see live result of some of the keyword’s his tracking for clients. It’s via this tool SerpBook, that makes it easy to track and report on keywords rankings for your site(s). If you decide to do the SEO yourself, this is a handy tool, or if you’re deciding to offer this as a service to customers it will come in handy for you to prove your worth.

4) National Positions is another with a job opening. Their article on Outbrain now available in South Africa is very interesting indeed as it opens the potential of loads of traffic from the busy news sites. I know I’ve clicked on many Outbrain links because the title has captured my attention.

5) TopSEOSouthAfrica rounds off this short list not because Anthea May is such a pretty face and one of the more photogenic SEO talking heads, or that she’s uses Divi the very same theme this site is running on which give her a beautiful website too.

She’s also very accurate with what you’re going to experience with the state of “run of the mill” SEO Agencies and I like her approach. The questions and advice she shares are critical for any company that you consider hiring an external company for this task.

There you go, those are the top 5 SEO companies I’ve chosen based on nothing more than my own whim. They’re just 5 that stood out for me from the millions of results that googling through back at me. Its by no means comprehensive and you should only use this list as a starting point for some of your own further research. Do your own due diligence.

These are however some of the more professional ones and you won’t go wrong with choosing one of them.

I’m sending this link to all the companies that I apply to and if you’re one of the people who’s read my cover letter and come to visit my site to follow up and read what I’ve done so far, congratulations, you’ve earned a link to your site.

You can either leave a comment below with your url in the appropriate field and the CommentLuv plugin will pull the latest article from your blog and give you a dofollow link or please contact me with the url of the link you’d like and I’ll add it in with no obligation on your part to give me a job.

I’m just grateful that you read my application so thoroughly. This is how I approach SEO and I can do the same for your clients.

Finally and with little fanfare, if you’d like to hire ME to work on your SEO, please find out how here.

First Update
In two days time, I’ve managed a ranking of position 41 in the local SERPs…

A Day Later and I’ve risen slightly in the .com of google but staying steady on the .co.za variety. Here’s my ProRankTracker results.

Update 3 (15/5/2015) I’m now in the top 40 with a rank of 34 on .co.za and 37 on .com. Progressing steadily upwards on the ranking.