Instagram gave you an audience. Search is where the customers are hiding, and they are telling you exactly what they want.
Tola sews the kind of clothes that make strangers cross the road to ask questions. Her corner of Lagos knows her. Her Instagram, built over five patient years, has crossed thirty thousand followers. She posts every day, reels of fabric falling through her hands, fittings, transformations, the little theatre a fashion page demands. The likes come. The fire emojis rain.
And some months, the order book is nearly empty.
This is the quiet confusion eating a whole generation of Nigerian fashion designers, makeup artists, hair stylists, wig vendors and skincare founders. They did everything the internet told them to do. They became content creators on top of being craftspeople. They dance, they transition, they chase trends and trending sounds at midnight. Yet the audience grows faster than the revenue, and each month the algorithm demands more performance for less reach, like a landlord who raises rent every time you repaint the shop.
I have spent thirty years in search, in Nigeria and now in the UK, and I want to hand Tola, and you, the missing piece plainly.
Instagram is a theatre. People come to be entertained, and sometimes, occasionally, romantically, they buy. Search is a market. Nobody types into Google or asks an AI assistant for fun. Every single search is a person raising their hand and announcing what they want, in their own words, at the exact moment they want it. The technical name for this announcement is search intent, and learning to read it is the closest thing to mind-reading that marketing has ever produced.
The businesses that learn to read it stop chasing attention and start harvesting intention. Let me show you how, in the language of our own industry.
Every search is a customer telling you where they are on the road to your shop
Watch one bride for a moment. Call her Kemi, and her introduction is in November.
Months out, Kemi searches things like asoebi styles for engagement, latest gele styles, bridal looks for yoruba traditional wedding. She is dreaming. She has no vendor in mind and no money in hand yet; she is collecting pictures and courage. A business that appears at this stage enters her imagination early, which is where loyalty is actually born.
Then her searches change shape. How to know original human hair before buying. What lasts longer, tape-in or sew-in. How much does bridal makeup cost in Lagos. She is learning and comparing now. Money is entering the conversation. She is deciding what to buy and building her list of who might deserve to sell it to her. The business that answers these questions honestly, especially the money questions everyone else hides from, walks into her shortlist wearing the crown of the one who told me the truth.
Finally, close to the day, the searches sharpen into pure purchase: bridal makeup artist in Ikeja available December, wig vendor in Lekki with same day delivery, tailor in Surulere that can finish asoebi in two weeks. Look at those words closely. Location, availability, speed, specific service. This is no longer a browser. This is a customer holding money, describing her emergency, begging to be found.
That is the entire secret, and I will put it in one sentence you can write on the workshop wall: the words people search are not keywords, they are confessions. Dreaming, learning, comparing, buying. Four stages, four different confessions, and each one deserves a different answer from your business.
Now here is the uncomfortable question. Tola posts beautifully every day. But which of Kemi’s four moments does any of it answer? A gorgeous reel answers none of them. It performs. Meanwhile some vendor with half Tola’s talent has a simple page answering how much does bridal makeup cost in Lagos, another showing asoebi styles she has actually sewn, a Google profile that says Surulere, open, responds quickly, and reviews confirming she delivers when she promises. Kemi never sees the reel. Kemi searches, and the internet hands her the vendor who answered her confessions.
The follower count was never the problem. The silence at the moments of intent was the problem.
Serving each confession, practically
So what does Tola actually do? Not abandon Instagram; the theatre still has its uses, and fashion is a visual faith. She adds a second wing to the business: content and presence built deliberately around the four confessions. Here is what that looks like for a Nigerian fashion or beauty business, concretely.
For the dreamers, she turns her finished work into browsable, searchable galleries with honest, descriptive names, the way people actually search: asoebi styles for December weddings, corporate wear for Nigerian women, bridal shower looks. Every gown she has ever sewn is a page waiting to be found, not just a post that died in the feed after forty-eight hours. Instagram posts sink. Search pages stand and keep working, month after month, like a shop assistant who never sleeps.
For the learners, she teaches, in her own voice, the things she already explains to customers weekly. How to care for lace. How to know quality ankara by touch. What a bride should ask a makeup artist before paying. This is the content that ranks for questions, gets shared into the estate and asoebi WhatsApp groups where Nigerian buying decisions are actually made, and, crucially, gets read by the AI engines now advising customers directly. When a bride asks her phone how to choose between two wig vendors, the machine answers with the wisdom of whoever taught the internet the answer. Let the teacher be you.
For the comparers, she does the frightening thing: she talks about money in public. Price ranges, what determines cost, what a deposit covers, why bespoke costs what it costs. In an industry famous for how much for this and DM for price, the vendor who answers the price question openly collects the trust of an entire market that has been quietly resenting the secrecy for years. I have watched this single change lift enquiry quality overnight, because the people who message after seeing prices are no longer window shoppers. They are qualified.
And for the buyers, the ones typing near me and available December, she makes sure the boring infrastructure is flawless, everything I have preached across this series: a complete Google Business Profile with her real face and real work, her area named, her hours true, her number in full international format for the diaspora bride planning from Manchester, reviews gathered continuously and answered warmly, and a WhatsApp that responds fast. Purchase-intent searches are won by whoever is findable, credible and reachable in the same sixty seconds. That is the whole contest at the bottom of the funnel. Speed and legibility, nothing poetic.
There is a calendar to all of it too, and our industry’s calendar is loud: December owambe season, the wedding months, Valentine’s, sallah and Christmas collections, back-to-school for the children’s lines. Search intent swells in waves, and the pages that will harvest December must be built and standing by September, because the machine takes time to trust new answers. The vendor who starts optimising in December is sewing the asoebi after the wedding.
The part where honesty is required
Now, the critical word, because you asked me to be critical and this industry needs it.
Fashion and beauty businesses are the most algorithm-dependent category I work with, and the dependence has been dressed up as strategy. Renting all your visibility from one entertainment platform is the same trap I have described for hotels renting from booking sites, except worse, because at least the booking platform sends guests with money. The feed mostly sends applause. Applause is lovely. Applause does not buy fabric.
Search is the correction, not because it is fashionable but because of what it is made of: intention, stated plainly, by people describing their own money. And the field is astonishingly open. Type your own trade and area into Google tonight, bridal makeup artist in your city, bespoke tailor in your area, and study who appears. In most Nigerian cities you will find directories, aggregators and half-dead pages, and almost no actual vendor who has done the work. The most visual, most talented, most Instagram-fluent industry in the country has somehow left the market square where intent lives almost completely unattended. For whoever moves first in each city and each niche, that is not a gap. That is an inheritance.
Reading intent, building the pages, winning the map results, staying visible to the AI engines now whispering recommendations into every customer’s ear, this is a craft of its own, and like sewing, it rewards those who do it daily. It is exactly the craft behind our SEO for fashion and beauty service, built for designers, salons, artists and beauty brands who want their visibility to finally match their skill.
The wall sentence, once more
Tola’s hands were never the problem. Her work was always worth crossing the road for. She was simply performing in the theatre while her customers stood in the market, confessing what they wanted to a search box, and being answered by lesser tailors.
The words people search are confessions. Dreaming, learning, comparing, buying. Answer all four, in your city, in your craft, in your own honest voice, and the order book stops depending on the algorithm’s mood.
Tonight, before you post the next reel, search your own trade and your own area the way Kemi would. Look at who the market hands her instead of you.
Then decide how much longer you can afford to be famous and unfindable at the same time.
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