SEO in S. A.

You’d think that internet marketing and search engine optimization in South Africa would be exactly the same as anywhere else in the world. I mean the principles don’t change across borders and what works in England or America should work here too, right?

Well, broadly speaking that is true but here in South Africa we have a whole set of problems to overcome before we can even get started to compete with the internationals!

1) Connectivity and bandwidth – thanks to Helkom’s (the most despised company in South Africa) pathetic service and insanely high bandwidth costs, we start with the legendary albatross around our necks. The majority of South African’s can’t even afford basic internet access and even the more affluent consider a decent ADSL connection a bit of a luxury. Sure, many have a small data cap for basic surfing and email usage but to buy enough bandwidth to set up and run a home based internet business costs much more than it does in overseas countries. Apart from this all locally based hosting companies are forced to buy their bandwidth from Telskum and as result, hosting fees are much higher locally than internationally.

No matter how good the hosting service is or how well meaning they may be – the fact that they are forced to resell bandwidth that they are paying too much for in the first place means they simply can’t compete on an equal footing

For this reason alone, I almost always recommend that people should host their sites on international servers but to compound the problem, if your site is hosted on a server within South Africa there is a very real chance that there will be long periods where nobody can access it due to the widespread theft of copper cables (and Telkom’s legendary speed in repairing such problems doesn’t help either!

2) Merchant accounts and payment gateways – for reasons only known to themselves, PayPal won’t allow South Africans to connect their PayPal accounts to South African bank accounts. This means that even though we can accept payment into a PayPal account, there is no way that we can actually access the funds! I learned this the hard way a few years ago when I set up a site and accepted a few thousand rands worth of sales before discovering that I couldn’t withdraw the money. After a certain amount of time (60 days if memory serves me correctly) PayPal simply informed me that since I hadn’t retrieved the money, they were refunding my customers. This is after I have packed and shipped the goods!

The only way to accept money via the internet in South Africa is by opening your own online merchant account and using a third party payment gateway (some of the banks provide their own gateway services). This isn’t as easy as it may sound at first. In order to open an online merchant account you can’t do so in your personal capacity and you must be a registered business so you pay your money, go through the registration process and wait around with your finger up your nose until the process in finally completed. Then you apply for your online merchant account and the fun begins….

I had set up several sites for other people using Nedbank’s system and so when I wanted to create a site for myself, they were my first port of call. I don’t bank with them and so they needed all sorts of codes, verifications, paper work and wot not from my bank which led to weeks of playing telephone tag with a bunch of people who didn’t know what I was talking about. Thanks to a friend in a right place, I got the phone number of one of the head honchos at Nedbank (a Mr Bowie I think…) and after a few phone calls between him and my own bank I was told (and I may be paraphrasing slightly here – it was about 5 years ago – but these are almost his exact words..) ” I’m not going to get into a game of who-said-what. I’m not interested and we don’t want your business. Good bye”. Thanks for wasting a month of my time there buddy!

Next I tried FNB… nobody knew what I was talking about. “eish… online what?”

So next I approached ABSA. It was great! They were helpful and knowledgeable and I had my online account approved and opened in about 2 days. Then they put me in touch with their payment gateway people and then the “fun” began again!

I’m not a professional programmer, but I can knock up a decent website and find my way around basic programming but it still took me about a week to connect to the payment gateway. (They sent me a whole lot of documentation by email. How was I to know that the cryptically named “APO” document contained the inadequate help files!)

Eventually I got it all connected and working, but the process kept freezing on their secure page. Every time I called support I was told to send a screen capture of the error. It’s your damn secure page, you should know what it looks like! Eventually I created a page with a screen capture video showing them step by step what I was doing and where the process was freezing. I was told they couldn’t view it because they were behind a firewall. This is a simple streaming flash video!

I asked them several times to look at my code to make sure I was passing the correct variables but I was told repeatedly that they couldn’t (wouldn’t) do that and after a couple of weeks when they finally agreed that there was a problem I was told that they would send a programmer to my place to sort it out, charging me at an hourly rate! No thanks!

Finally I tried Standard Bank. What a pleasure! They sent somebody to me to sign the contracts and open the merchant account within a day and everything was settled within about 36 hours. They put me onto VCS as a payment gateway which ran so smoothly that it scared me! I decided to pay a little extra and use another company (whose name escapes me) to host my gateway pages on their secure server because they do custom work and the payment pages look like the rest of my websites. The programmer’s name is Ainsley and when ever I set up a new site I just call him and I’m sorted out in a couple of hours.

Moral of the story… the only payment system I can recommend is a Standard Bank merchant account with a payment gateway supplied by VCS. I have also heard good things about MyGate as a payment gateway (they can interface with a merchant account from any bank) and I am ion the process of setting up a site for a friend using them. I’ll report back as to how it goes when the site is live.

3) Post Office theft – OK, I went on a bit about banks and payment systems but the post office is another problem faced by South Africans when setting up an online business. I have had several charge backs because parcels take so long to arrive that customers get nervous and think I haven’t sent their orders. I have also had more than one case of customers complaining that only a portion of the order arrived and that can only be attributed to light fingered post office “wekkas” helping themselves. There have been enough exposés on TV to know how rife this problem is.

OK – I think I’ve rambled on enough now and I don’t want to make this post too long. That’s only the tip of the iceberg and I’ll probably do another post or two about the unique problems that internet based business face in South Africa at some stage but I’d like to sign off by saying that I don’t want to be all “doom and gloom”. Yes – it can be challenging and yes, it is probably a bit harder here in South Africa than it is internationally, but it not impossible. The average person CAN start and run a very profitable internet based business for a relitively small ammount or money and that is what I am going to be posting about here!