Today’s SEO case study features AfricanThings — a fast growing business in the African products industry:

A little background. 

Tosin Lawson, the founder of AfricanThings is an expert in Product Design and Manufacture. She returned to Nigeria and started AfricanThings to help promote African designs and culture in everyday lifestyle and build a business around something she’s passionate about.

To do this, she needed to find a way to generate recurring traffic and leads. She also needed a user-friendly website to retain visitors and we were contracted to help with this assignment.

I knew we needed to build an SEO strategy centered on evergreen content that would help generate long-term exposure, position the brand as an authority in the industry, capture leads, and ultimately convert them into paying customers but that wouldn’t work if the website remained as it was. 

So, the first step was to have the website re-designed and optimized for SEO. We re-mapped the sitelinks and utilized focus keywords wherever necessary. My team rolled out the new banners and we recommended better image quality for products and added a blog to draw in organic traffic.

After the updates, we came up with a design with a better score:

We had to go ahead with the campaign with a lower budget than we planned but we won’t let that stop us. We also needed to rank within a very short timeframe. So we setup a Google PPC campaign to capture search queries related to the brand products and used a Google Display Network campaign to create more awareness. We coupled this with the SEO and content strategy I had initially setup for the campaign hasten the process.

This included analyzing major competitors, researching core and long-tail keywords, researching blog/content topics, suggesting types of content to create and creating a tailored action plan for the brand.

The result? Increased traffic, more leads and followership on Instagram jumped from 9k to 15k+ followers in less than 2 months of the campaign.

Keywords
Our focus audience were tourists visiting Nigeria and Nigerians who leave the country often. We included popular keywords that they’ll most likely search for – Something like ‘African gift shops in Lagos’, ‘African gift shops near Lagos Airport’ etc then we handpicked some of them and put them to work.

Before SEO

After SEO

How long did it take to reach #1 spot on google?
It took 3 weeks to rank on first page and 2 months to rank #1. By following the action plan, the brand will be able to keep its spot and rank for broader keywords.

Working with the brand was fun and very insightful. I got to learn more about the brand and how underrated Africa-inspired products have been here in Nigeria but very much appreciated outside on foreign lands. We need to start believing in our own products and I’ve taken a step by getting myself an Ankara laptop bag .

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