There was a version of SEO where you wrote "best events company Cape Town" fourteen times in six hundred words, forced the phrase into every heading whether it made grammatical sense or not, and waited for the rankings to arrive. It sort of worked, for a while, the way stuffing more bread into a sandwich technically makes it bigger. Google noticed. Then it fixed it.
That version of SEO has been dead for years, and yet an enormous amount of business blog content is still being written as though nobody sent the memo. The good news is that what works now is much closer to plain good writing, which means it is easier to explain and harder to fake.
This is a practical guide. We are going to use one imaginary business throughout, an events company in Cape Town, so every point has a real example attached rather than a principle floating in mid-air. Swap in your own business as you read.
First, what a keyword actually is
A keyword is not a magic word you sprinkle on a page. It is simply the phrase a real person types into Google when they want what you sell. That is the whole concept. Your job is to work out what they type, then write the page that genuinely answers it better than anyone else's.
Where most businesses go wrong is choosing keywords based on what they call themselves internally, rather than what customers actually search. Our events company might describe itself as offering "bespoke experiential activations." Nobody in the history of Google has ever typed that. What people actually type is closer to:
- "corporate event planner Cape Town"
- "year end function venues Cape Town"
- "how much does a corporate event cost"
- "team building ideas Cape Town"
- "wedding coordinator Western Cape"
Notice how different those are from each other. Some are looking for a supplier right now. Some are still researching. That difference matters more than almost anything else, and it has a name.
Search intent: the part everyone skips
Search intent means the reason behind the search. Get this wrong and even a perfectly optimised page will fail, because you answered a question nobody asked.
There are roughly three kinds of intent worth knowing:
Someone wants to buy or book. "Corporate event planner Cape Town." They are shopping. This person needs a service page, not a blog post: what you do, proof you have done it before, pricing guidance, and an obvious way to contact you.
Someone wants to learn. "How much does a corporate event cost in South Africa." They are not ready to book, they are working out whether they can afford to. This person needs a blog post that actually answers the question honestly, including real numbers. If you answer it well, you are the company they contact when they are ready.
Someone wants a specific thing. "Sorted Events Cape Town contact." They already know who you are. Do not make them hunt.
The mistake is writing a blog post for a buying keyword, or writing a sales page for a research keyword. If someone searches "how much does a corporate event cost" and lands on your services page with no prices on it, they leave. That bounce is a signal to Google that your page did not answer the question, and next time it ranks you a little lower.
Long-tail keywords: where small businesses actually win
"Events company" is a keyword our imaginary business will never rank for. Every large agency in the country is fighting over it, with far bigger budgets.
"Year end function venues in Cape Town for 200 people" is a different story. Fewer people search it, but the ones who do are far closer to booking, and almost nobody has written a proper page about it. That is a long-tail keyword: longer, more specific, less competitive, and much more likely to convert.
The practical rule is this. Stop trying to rank for the two-word phrase that describes your entire industry. Start writing genuinely useful pages about the specific things your customers actually ask you on the phone. Every question you find yourself answering repeatedly by email is a blog post that will rank, because if your customers are asking it, other people are Googling it.
Write down the ten questions clients ask you most often. That is your content plan for the next ten months, and it is better than anything a keyword tool will hand you cold.
One page, one keyword, one job
Each page should target one main keyword. Not five. If you try to make a single page rank for corporate events, weddings, team building and venue hire all at once, it does none of them well and Google cannot tell what the page is actually about.
Our events company should have separate pages for corporate events, for weddings, and for team building, each one properly written, rather than one "Our Services" page that mentions everything in a list.
It matters that two pages do not compete for the same phrase either. If you write three separate blog posts all targeting "corporate event planner Cape Town," they split your own authority between them and Google picks one, more or less at random. One keyword, one page, one job.
How to actually use Yoast
If your site runs on WordPress, you probably have Yoast SEO installed. It is genuinely useful, and it is also widely misunderstood, so here is how to use it properly.
Set your focus keyphrase first. In the Yoast box beneath your post editor, enter the one phrase you want that page to rank for, for example "year end function venues Cape Town." Everything Yoast tells you afterwards is measured against that phrase, so entering it after you have finished writing rather defeats the point.
Then work through what it asks for. Yoast checks a handful of sensible things, and each one is asking a fair question:
- Is the keyphrase in your SEO title? It should be, ideally near the front.
- Is it in the URL slug? Keep the slug short and readable:
/year-end-function-venues-cape-town, not/post-id-4471. - Is it in the meta description? That is the grey summary line under your headline in the search results. Write it as a sentence that makes someone want to click, not a keyword list.
- Does it appear in the introduction? If your first paragraph does not mention what the page is about, that is worth fixing regardless of SEO.
- Is it in at least one subheading?
- Is the keyphrase density in range? Yoast wants roughly half a percent to three percent. Below that and the page is vague. Above and you are stuffing.
- Do your images have alt text? Describe the image honestly. "Marquee set up for a 200-person year end function in Constantia" is useful to a blind reader and to Google. "IMG_4471.jpg" helps nobody.
- Are there internal and external links? Link to your own relevant pages and, where it genuinely helps the reader, out to a credible source.
Do not ignore the readability tab. It flags long sentences, big walls of text, passive voice, and paragraphs without subheadings. That tab is quietly the more valuable one, because it is really just asking whether a human can read this comfortably.
Now the important caveat. A green light in Yoast does not mean you will rank. Yoast is a checklist tool, not an oracle. It cannot tell whether anyone actually searches your chosen phrase, whether your content says anything worth reading, or whether ten better pages already exist. It is entirely possible to get every light green on a page that will never rank for anything, because you picked a phrase nobody searches and said nothing new about it.
Treat green lights as "I have not made any obvious technical mistakes," not "I have written something worth ranking." The writing still has to be good. Yoast just stops you tripping over your own shoelaces.
Write for the person, not the algorithm
Google's ranking systems are now built around one question: does this genuinely help the human who searched for it. The industry shorthand is E-E-A-T, standing for experience, expertise, authority and trust, and it has shifted from a nice-to-have to close to a hard filter. Thin, generic content that nobody with real knowledge appears to have touched gets quietly buried, however neatly the keyword sits in the heading.
Practically, that means saying something only you could say. Our events company writing "we are passionate about creating memorable experiences" has said nothing; every competitor's site says it too. Writing "we have run about forty year end functions in Cape Town, and the single biggest cost people underestimate is wet weather backup, which typically adds fifteen to twenty percent" is worth reading, is impossible to fake, and is exactly the sort of first-hand detail Google now rewards.
If a paragraph would still be true with a competitor's name pasted in, it is not earning its place.
Answer the question in the first two sentences
People searching a question want the answer, not a run-up. If someone searches "how much does a corporate event cost," the page that wins tells them clearly, near the top, then earns the scroll with detail and nuance underneath.
Burying the answer under three paragraphs of throat-clearing was always bad writing. Now it is also bad SEO, because a human skimming on a phone and an AI tool trying to summarise your page are both hunting for the same thing: a clear answer they can lift out cleanly.
So structure your headings as the actual questions people ask, in the words they actually use, then answer that question straight away underneath. Everything after that is supporting evidence.
Structure the page so machines can follow it
People no longer only search on Google. They ask ChatGPT, they read the AI summaries that now sit above the traditional results, and increasingly your page gets read by a machine before it is ever read by a person, a machine deciding whether to summarise you, cite you, or skip you.
That machine rewards exactly what good writing rewards: clear headings, one idea per section, concrete examples rather than vague claims, and a structure it can follow without guessing. Short paragraphs. Real subheadings. Specifics over adjectives.
This is also where structured data earns its keep, quietly telling search engines what your page actually is, what question it answers, and who wrote it. It is not a trick. It just makes the machine-readable version of your page say the same true thing the visible version already says.
AI search is not a separate game worth gaming
There is a small industry now selling "AI SEO" as an entirely different discipline needing entirely different tricks. Mostly it is not. The content getting cited inside AI summaries is overwhelmingly the same content that would have ranked the old-fashioned way: clear, well structured, genuinely useful, written by someone who knows the subject.
Chase clarity and real expertise and you are already doing most of what AI search optimisation actually means. Chase the shortcut and you are back to stuffing bread into the sandwich, just with better vocabulary.
The actual checklist
Before you publish anything, run through this:
- One clear keyword, chosen because people really search it, not because it sounds impressive.
- The right kind of page for that intent: service page for buyers, blog post for researchers.
- The question answered clearly in the first two sentences.
- Headings written as real questions in real language.
- At least one thing only you could have written: a number, an example, a genuine opinion from doing the work.
- Keyphrase in the title, slug, meta description, intro and one subheading, used naturally.
- Alt text on every image, describing what is actually in it.
- Links to your own relevant pages, and out to a credible source where it helps.
- Yoast readability tab checked, long sentences and walls of text broken up.
- Read it out loud. If you would not say it to a client's face, rewrite it.
That is the whole job. No stuffing required.
If you would rather someone who does this for a living write the content while you get on with running the business, that is squarely what we do, from the words to the website they live on. Get in touch and let's write something worth ranking.
