A business owner told me recently, with real pride, that his company has had a website since 2019.
A young man, a relative of a relative, built it for him one December for a modest fee, disappeared back to Harare and was never heard from again.
The site still loads. The logo is still there. Nobody has ever found it by searching for what the business sells.
It exists the way a photograph in a drawer exists. True, present and completely useless to anyone who does not already know exactly where to look.
This is the part nobody explains when they sell you a website. Having one is not the same as being found by one.
A website with no visitors is a shop with a bricked up front door and one tiny window at the back, technically open, legally trading and invisible to every customer who did not already have the address written down.
Search engines work the way a good kombi rank works. There is an order to it and it is not random.
The conductor who shouts destinations loudest, clearest and most often gets the passengers, while the one mumbling from the back of the queue watches everyone walk past him.
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A search engine reads your website the same way that conductor reads a stop. It looks for the plain words a stranger would type, plumber in Lupane, school shoes near me, generator repairs, not the clever slogan your cousin thought sounded impressive.
If your site never says, in ordinary language, what you sell and where, the search engine has nothing to shout on your behalf.
There are a handful of unglamorous things that decide whether you make that shout list.
Whether your business is properly listed with correct hours and address on the free tools built for exactly this.
Whether other reputable pages, a newspaper mention, an industry directory, a satisfied client’s own website, ever link back to you, since that is the internet’s version of a trusted recommendation.
And whether the words on your own pages describe your actual services in the language a customer uses, rather than the language a designer used to make the site look clever in a pitch meeting.
Then there is speed, which behaves exactly like a private load shedding schedule that only your website suffers.
A page overloaded with enormous, uncompressed photos and five plugins nobody asked for takes its time deciding to appear, and somewhere around the third second of staring at a blank screen, the visitor simply leaves.
They do not send a complaint. They do not even remember the name of the business they gave up on.
They just quietly try the next name on the list and you never see the moment you lost them, because a closed door does not ring a bell.
The honest test and it costs nothing, is to stop searching for your own business name and instead search the way a real stranger would.
Type the plain words a first time customer might use for what you sell, in your own town and see where you land. If you are nowhere on the first page, the website is not broken exactly.
It is simply a very well kept secret, and a business cannot survive on secrets it is keeping from its own customers.
None of this requires rebuilding the whole site from nothing and it is rarely one dramatic fix. It is usually a handful of small, deliberate corrections, the kind a good mechanic makes once he opens the bonnet instead of just admiring the paint job.
*Wilfred Munyaradzi Kahlari is a cybersecurity expert, software developer and consultant at Kingwil Consultants. He works with boards, government institutions and businesses to strengthen digital governance and build resilient technology frameworks. For engagements: [email protected] | +263 772 212 796.
