Black Friday is only days away, December trading follows straight after, and across South Africa retailers and service businesses are moving from planning to spending, usually with bigger advertising budgets. Top Click, a specialist digital marketing agency that works only on SEO, Google Ads and answer engine optimisation, has picked this moment to share a straightforward list of the account problems it sees most often when it audits a business for the first time.
The thinking behind the timing is easy to follow. If a Google Ads account or a website has a structural fault in October, that fault is still there in December, and by then more money is flowing through it. Sorting out the basics before the year’s busiest weeks means the extra budget does real work instead of making the waste bigger.
Why timing makes the difference
Over 18 years of working only in search, Top Click has reviewed a very large number of websites and advertising accounts. The agency’s site describes a pattern that keeps coming up: monthly reports land on time and invoices get paid, yet traffic stays flat, rankings stay where they are and the cost of every sale keeps rising. The cause is rarely a small budget or an unusually tough market. Usually a few fixable problems have gone unchecked.
Those problems get expensive in the festive season. A campaign that loses part of every rand loses more rands once daily budgets go up. And as shoppers search harder for gifts and specials, a website that Google finds hard to read misses more of the visits it should be getting. That is why the agency is asking businesses to check their own setups against the points below before the rush starts.
Common Google Ads problems
Top of the list is putting a big slice of the budget behind the company’s own brand name. Someone who types a business name into Google is usually already looking for that business and would often reach it without an ad. Brand clicks convert well, so heavy bidding on them makes a report look strong, but it can also hide a rest-of-account that barely breaks even. Top Click recommends checking how much of the spend goes to brand terms and measuring non-brand campaigns on their own.
Next comes accepting every recommendation Google offers. Many of the suggestions inside Google Ads are built to raise spend, and applying them all without review can pull an account away from what actually earns money for the business. The agency says it ignores most of these suggestions and makes deliberate changes rather than bulk ones.
A third problem is a negative keyword list that is missing or has been left alone. With no negatives, ads show for searches that will never become a sale, and every one of those clicks is paid for. Checking the search terms report regularly usually reveals where the money is going.
Online stores face a fourth issue. Many push their product feeds into Google Merchant Center straight from the shop platform, with weak titles and thin descriptions. Top Click sees the feed as the heart of Shopping performance for e-commerce and works through titles, descriptions and attributes one product at a time, which counts for even more when the festive range is at its biggest.
Fifth is a cluttered structure, with everything squeezed into two or three broad campaigns and no proper split by product, service or intent. Sixth is conversion tracking that records the wrong actions, such as newsletter sign-ups, as though they were sales. An account that cannot clearly define a conversion cannot be optimised for one.
Top Click is a Google Premier Partner and manages Google Ads to this level of detail as standard, giving clients access so they can see which keywords spend money and which convert.
Common SEO problems
In organic search, the issues the agency uncovers are often simpler than owners expect. Page titles that just read “Home”, empty meta descriptions and absent H1 headings still turn up often. These are basic on-page fixes that take days rather than months, and they can make a clear difference to how Google understands a site.
Then there are backlinks that were promised and never built. The agency suggests asking an existing supplier to show the backlink profile in a professional tool such as Ahrefs. If no new links show up, or the ones that do look like low-quality spam, the work is not being done properly.
Technical SEO is another weak spot. Slow pages, a broken mobile layout and missing structured data can hold a site back before any content plan gets a chance to help. A quick check in Google PageSpeed Insights is often enough to show whether the technical base needs work.
Last, keyword research often targets terms nobody searches for, or terms that do not match what the business really sells. As an SEO agency, Top Click begins by researching what customers actually type, then matches those searches to the right pages before anything is written or optimised.
What happens with a new client
Each engagement opens with a free snapshot audit covering the site, the competitors and the keywords. It lays out what is broken and what is possible, with no sales pitch attached. If the business decides to proceed, phase one fixes the foundation: technical SEO, on-page optimisation, campaign structure and shopping feeds. Phase two then builds on that base every month through strategic backlinks, content and ongoing campaign management.
Top Click stays small on purpose. Only senior people work on client accounts, no juniors are learning on a client’s budget, and no account manager sits between the client and the specialist doing the work. Clients sign up month to month, with no lock-in contracts or penalty clauses, and their data always remains theirs.
Explaining the work is a big part of the agency’s approach. Video explainers accompany monthly reports, and the founder has released more than 700 short videos on search marketing so clients know what they are paying for and can recognise poor management on their own.
Is the review a good fit?
The agency says plainly that it does not suit every business. It does its best work with established companies that already have a marketing team, sell products or services people genuinely want and run a website able to convert the traffic it gets. It does not provide social media management, email design or other full-service work, and it does not take on commission or affiliate deals. For businesses that match that profile, a short review ahead of the festive peak can show whether their current setup can handle the extra spend.
Any business wanting a snapshot audit before Black Friday, or simply wanting to learn how Top Click works, can find details of its SEO, Google Ads and AEO services at https://topclick.co.za/.
About Top Click
Top Click is a South African digital marketing agency that specialises only in SEO, Google Ads and answer engine optimisation. A Google Premier Partner with 18 years in search, it runs as a small team of senior specialists with no juniors on client accounts, and it works with clients month to month with no lock-in.
Media Contact
Top Click
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +27 11 440 6268
Website: https://topclick.co.za/
