I Spent Thirty Years Guiding Planes and Could Not Get a Dog Shelter Onto Page One

The Tower

For thirty-one years I was an air traffic controller at the airport in what we now call Gqeberha. I retired in 2022 with a good pension, a bad back, and a habit I still cannot shake of looking up at every aircraft that passes overhead and working out its heading.

People imagine the job is all drama. Mostly it is calm, careful attention, hour after hour, to a screen of small moving dots. You learn to hold a dozen things in your head at once, to speak clearly, and to stay polite on the radio even when a pilot is being an idiot. What you do not learn, at least not in my day, is anything whatsoever about websites.

Retirement Was Too Quiet

My wife Lindiwe warned me. She said, "You have been listening to a radio for thirty years. You will go mad in silence." She was right. By the third month I had repainted the garden wall twice and started having opinions about our neighbour's hedge.

So I volunteered at the animal shelter in Walmer, partly because our old dog Jock had come from there years ago, and partly because Lindiwe needed me out of the house. I walked dogs on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I liked it. Dogs do not care that you used to be important. They care whether you brought the good treats.

The Meeting Where I Did Not Keep My Mouth Shut

In the second year, the shelter committee had a meeting about adoptions. Numbers were down. Dogs were staying in the kennels longer, and the longer a dog stays, the harder it gets to place, because they start to look sad and frightened in photographs. The chairwoman, a retired schoolteacher called Mrs Fourie, put a printout on the table showing that almost nobody was finding the shelter online.

Someone said, "We need somebody to sort out the website."

There was a silence. I have sat in a lot of meetings in my life, and I know that silence. It is the silence of a room waiting for the newest person to make a mistake. I made it. I said, "I could have a look."

Mrs Fourie wrote my name on the whiteboard before I could take it back.

The Website Nobody Had Touched

The website had been built in 2015 by a volunteer who had since moved to Australia. Nobody had the password. When we finally found it, in an old email in Mrs Fourie's sent folder, I logged in and discovered a site that still listed dogs who had been adopted, or worse, in 2018. The contact number went to a phone that had been stolen at a market. The photographs were tiny and blurry. The page about adopting a dog was one paragraph long and ended in the middle of a sentence.

I typed adopt a dog in Gqeberha into Google on my own phone, the way a stranger would. We were not on the first page. We were not on the second. On the third page there was a link to a Facebook post from 2019.

I felt the same feeling I used to get when an aircraft was not where it should be on the screen. Something is wrong, and it is now your job.

Where Do You Even Start

I did what I always did when I did not understand a system. I tried to learn it properly from the ground up. I bought two books, which were outdated by the time they reached my house. I read articles that used words like keywords and backlinks and meta descriptions as if everybody knew what those were. I did not.

Lindiwe found me one evening at the dining room table with eleven browser tabs open and the expression, she said, of a man trying to land four planes on one runway.

The Videos

It was our granddaughter Ayanda, who is twenty-two and studies in Cape Town, who suggested I stop reading and start watching. She said that was how she learned everything, from cooking to fixing her laptop. I was sceptical. My idea of a video was a man shouting about a product in front of a ring light.

But I tried it. I searched for beginner SEO video tutorials one evening, and I started at the beginning, with a notebook beside me like I was back in training. Some of the videos I watched were useless. Some were selling something within thirty seconds. A few were exactly what I needed, which was someone explaining calmly, step by step, what Google was actually looking at, and why.

One of the channels I kept coming back to belonged to Josh Maraney. I liked that he explained things plainly, without making me feel stupid for not knowing them already. I have no connection to him, and I am sure he has no idea a retired controller in the Eastern Cape was taking notes on his videos with a pencil. But I watched a lot of them that winter.

Treating It Like a Checklist

Air traffic control runs on checklists, and so I made one. Fix the contact number. Remove every dog who was no longer there. Write a proper page about adopting, with the real steps, what it costs, what we ask of families and why. Give every dog their own page with a good photo and a real description, written the way a person would talk about a friend, not the way a form would. Make sure the shelter's Google listing showed the right hours and address.

Then I worked through it, one item at a time, a bit every evening. The descriptions were the part I enjoyed most. I spent time with each dog on my walking mornings and wrote down what I noticed. Bongo, who leans his whole weight against your legs when he is happy. Princess, who is terrified of brooms but loves children. Old Max, grey in the face, who sits by the gate every afternoon at four as if expecting someone.

The Photographs

The videos taught me the website mattered, but Lindiwe taught me the photographs mattered more. She is the artistic one. She came with me on a Saturday with her old camera and we took every dog outside into the sun, onto the grass, away from the kennel bars. We got down to their level. We waited until they relaxed. Some of them looked like completely different animals.

I spent another few evenings learning from digital marketing videos about how to name image files, describe them properly, and make the pages load faster on a phone. It is astonishing how many small things there are. It is also strangely familiar. In the tower, a hundred small correct things make one safe landing.

The Slow Climb

Nothing happened for weeks. I checked our position on Google every morning with my coffee, which Lindiwe said was unhealthy, and she was right.

Then, around the third month, we appeared at the bottom of the first page for one search. Then a little higher. The shelter phone, the new one, started ringing more. Mrs Fourie reported at the next meeting that adoptions had gone up for two months in a row, and that three families had mentioned they found a specific dog on the website and came in asking for him by name.

Old Max

The one I will remember is Max. He had been at the shelter for fourteen months. Older dogs are hard to place. People want puppies. I wrote his page myself, and I wrote about the gate at four o'clock.

In August, a retired couple from Summerstrand phoned. The husband said his wife had read Max's page aloud to him at breakfast and cried. They came that Saturday. Max walked out to their car without looking back, which is the best and worst thing to watch when you have walked a dog every Tuesday and Thursday for a year.

I went home and told Lindiwe. She said, "So you landed one."

I said, "No. He landed himself. I just cleared the runway."