Most SEO advice still in circulation was written for a search engine that no longer exists. Keyword density, exact-match anchor text, and a monthly quota of directory links were once genuinely effective. Today they range from useless to actively harmful, and the businesses still buying them are paying for a strategy that stopped working several algorithm generations ago.

Here is what we actually do, in the order we do it.

Start with intent, not keywords

A keyword is a string. Intent is the job the person is trying to get done. "Web design Nairobi" and "how much does a website cost in Kenya" overlap on topic but describe two very different people — one is comparing suppliers, the other is still working out whether they can afford to start.

Ranking for a term you have mismatched to intent produces the worst possible outcome: traffic that arrives, finds the wrong page, and leaves. Search engines notice that pattern and act on it. So before writing anything, we work out which of four jobs the query represents:

  1. Informational — they want to understand something before deciding anything.
  2. Comparative — they are evaluating options and want criteria.
  3. Transactional — they are ready to act and want the path made obvious.
  4. Navigational — they already know who they want and are looking for you specifically.

Each job wants a different page. Trying to serve all four with one page reliably serves none of them.

Technical health is table stakes

No amount of content strategy rescues a site that is slow, unreachable, or invisible to crawlers. This is unglamorous work and it is the highest-leverage thing most sites can do.

  • Core Web Vitals on real mobile devices — not on a desktop test run from a fast connection.
  • One canonical URL per page, with redirects that resolve in a single hop.
  • A sitemap that is generated at build time and therefore cannot drift from reality.
  • Structured data that accurately describes the page: Organization, Article, FAQPage, Breadcrumb.
  • Internal links that actually connect related pages, rather than everything pointing at the homepage.

Write for the answer box, not just the blue link

The most consequential change of the last two years is that a growing share of searches are answered above the results — by AI overviews, featured snippets and assistant responses that synthesise rather than list. If your content cannot be quoted cleanly, it will not be cited.

In practice this means leading with the answer instead of building up to it, using headings that are the questions people actually ask, and keeping the key claim in a single self-contained paragraph that survives being lifted out of context.

Write the paragraph you would want a machine to read aloud on your behalf. That is now a real distribution channel.

Local signals still decide local searches

For a Kenyan business competing on local queries, a complete and active Google Business Profile frequently outperforms months of content work. Consistent name, address and phone details across every listing; real photographs; a steady flow of reviews; and pages that name the areas you genuinely serve rather than a spam list of every county in the country.

Build depth on one topic, not breadth on twenty

The most common failure we see in SME content strategy is a blog with forty posts across forty unrelated subjects, none of which rank. Search engines assess authority topically. Ten thorough, interlinked pages about one thing you genuinely know will outperform forty shallow pages about everything.

Pick the subject where you have real operational knowledge that a competitor cannot cheaply copy. Write the definitive local resource on it. Link the pages to one another deliberately so the cluster reads as a body of work rather than a pile of posts. Then keep it current — a page updated annually outperforms a page published once and abandoned, and the update costs a fraction of a new article.

Measure what compounds

Rank tracking on a handful of vanity terms tells you very little. The metrics that predict revenue are impressions and click-through by query group in Search Console, the number of distinct pages earning traffic, and conversion rate by landing page.

Organic search is slow and then sudden. Most of what we build shows little movement for eight to twelve weeks and then compounds for years. The strategies that work in 2025 are the ones you can still be running in 2027 without embarrassment.