Cobus van der Westhuizen is the CEO of Juicy Designs, a Pretoria based digital marketing agency operating since 2015. He leads the agency's search and content strategy across SEO, answer engine optimisation, and social media.

Background

Cobus co-founded Juicy Designs and has spent over 15 years working in South African digital marketing. His focus is the practical side of search: how real businesses get found, get cited by AI answer engines, and turn organic traffic into clients. He works hands-on across technical SEO, content strategy, and the newer layer of AEO and generative engine optimisation that now shapes how brands appear in AI Overviews and chat assistants.

He is Google Ads certified and Google Analytics certified, and he leads the strategy on every Google Ads account the agency runs. Keeping paid search and SEO under one person is deliberate: paid campaigns reveal within days which search terms carry buying intent and which pages convert, and Cobus feeds those lessons straight back into the organic and content work instead of treating the two channels as separate departments.

He started the agency in 2015 with his co-founder Wynand van der Westhuizen, Juicy Designs' Creative Director and a Meta Business Partner. The division of work has held since the beginning: Wynand leads creative and design, Cobus leads search, strategy and measurement. The agency remains founder led, based in Pretoria (Tshwane), and works without long-term contracts.

Areas of expertise

SEOAnswer engine optimisationGenerative engine optimisationContent strategySocial media marketingTechnical SEO

In practice these overlap. The same page has to rank in Google, earn a citation from an AI assistant and convince the person who lands on it, so Cobus treats search, content and social as one programme rather than a set of disconnected services.

Certifications

Google-certified in digital marketing, Google Ads and analytics-related disciplines. Some certifications were issued under his previous surname, Cobus Pieterse.

What Cobus works on at Juicy

  • Search and content strategy for agency clients
  • AEO and AIO programmes that build brand visibility in AI search
  • Editorial direction and fact-checking standards for published content
  • Social media strategy and brand voice development

How he works with clients

Founder led means the founders do the client work. When a business briefs Juicy Designs on search, content or paid media, the strategy comes from Cobus himself, and he stays involved for as long as the agency runs the account. Because there are no long-term contracts, the work has to justify itself month by month.

Quotes are handled the same way: on request, by a person. You describe what you need, someone at the agency reviews it properly, and you receive a proposal within four working hours. Nothing is auto-generated.

The numbers behind the agency

Juicy Designs holds a 4.9-star Google rating from more than 200 reviews and has worked with 64+ clients since 2015. Across the paid media accounts it manages, the agency averages a 4.8x return on ad spend, roughly double the industry average. Those are agency figures rather than personal ones, and they are published so clients can hold the agency to them.

Editorial role

Every article credited to Cobus on the Juicy Designs blog links back to this page, and each one goes through the same review before it is published. One founder writes, the other reviews, and Lenata Oosthuizen fact-checks the final draft. So when Cobus authors a post, Wynand reviews it; when Wynand writes, Cobus does the reviewing. That means any claim about SEO, AI search or paid media published under his name has been checked by someone other than the writer.

Connect

Reach Cobus and the team through the Juicy Designs contact page.

All articles authored by Cobus follow the Juicy Designs editorial policy.