What Nigerian fintechs can learn from Prestmit’s SEO strategy for growth

An opinion piece by Fiyinfolu Adekunle

A few years ago, if you asked ten Nigerian fintech marketers how they planned to acquire their next 100,000 users, most of the answers would have sounded the same.

Paid advertising, influencer partnerships, referral campaigns, and social media promotions dominated growth conversations. Everyone was competing for visibility in the same places and often paying increasingly higher acquisition costs to do it.

Working in the cryptocurrency space, I saw the same pattern everywhere. Paid campaigns delivered quick wins, but growth often slowed the moment spending stopped. That raised an important question: if acquisition costs continued rising and competition kept intensifying, what channel could create a sustainable advantage over the long term?

For me, the answer was organic search. While many fintech brands were focused on buying attention, I believed there was an opportunity to earn it by becoming the most useful source of information for people already searching for answers.

Why We Bet on Organic Search

At the time, I was leading product marketing initiatives for Prestmit, a digital asset exchange operating in a highly competitive market. Success depended on more than visibility. Users needed to understand the product, trust the platform, and feel confident enough to complete transactions.

That observation shaped my thinking around SEO. Rather than viewing it purely as a traffic channel, I saw it as a trust-building channel. Search allowed us to meet users at the exact moment they were looking for information, educate them without interruption, and establish credibility before asking them to take action.

There was also a commercial advantage. Paid acquisition has limits because every campaign eventually ends. Organic search offered something different. Every useful article, landing page, and educational resource had the potential to keep attracting users long after publication.

Building Content Architecture Around Search Intent

The strategy started with understanding how people searched. Using Google Search Console, SEMrush, competitor research, customer feedback, and community conversations, I looked for recurring questions and patterns in user behaviour.

What emerged was simple but powerful. Most people were not searching for brands. They were searching for solutions. They wanted answers about cryptocurrency transactions, exchange rates, digital payments, platform comparisons, and transaction security.
That insight shaped the content strategy. We created educational content for awareness-stage users, comparison content for evaluation-stage users, and product-focused resources for those ready to act. Instead of publishing isolated articles, we built a content ecosystem designed to support users from discovery through conversion.

The Technical SEO Foundation

Content was only part of the equation. Strong content performs better when supported by strong technical foundations, which is why SEO became a cross-functional effort involving marketing, product, and engineering teams.

We focused heavily on site speed, mobile experience, internal linking, page architecture, crawlability, and metadata optimisation. These improvements helped search engines understand our content while creating a smoother experience for users.

What made the difference was collaboration. Product, engineering, and marketing teams worked toward the same goal, creating a stronger acquisition engine where progress in one area strengthened performance across the entire system.

What 6.53 Million Impressions Actually Means

Over time, the strategy generated 6.53 million organic search impressions and contributed to an average of over 94,000 monthly organic users, accounting for roughly 69% of new user acquisition on the platform.

The numbers were encouraging, but the bigger achievement was what they represented. Organic search evolved into one of the most efficient and sustainable acquisition channels available to the business. Users arrived with a stronger intent because they were actively looking for solutions rather than responding to an advertisement.

The results reinforced something many growth teams underestimate. Search is far more than a traffic channel. When executed properly, it becomes an acquisition engine, and often a retention tool as well.

Every piece of useful content strengthened the system. Instead of restarting the acquisition process every month, we continued building on assets that were already working. That compounding effect is what makes organic search fundamentally different from most growth channels.

Three Decisions That Drove the Model

Looking back, dozens of tactical decisions contributed to the outcome, but three stood out more than the rest.
First, treating keyword research as market research helped uncover what customers genuinely wanted to know.

Second, building trust through E-E-A-T principles strengthened credibility in a category where confidence directly influences conversion.

Third, mapping content to clear conversion pathways ensured visibility translated into meaningful business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.

Keyword Research as Market Research

One of the biggest shifts in my thinking came when I stopped treating keyword research as an SEO exercise and started treating it as market research. Search queries reveal what customers are curious about, confused about, and actively trying to solve.

The more closely I listened to those signals, the easier it became to create content that addressed real needs rather than assumed ones. That improved not only search performance but also product messaging and positioning.

Building for E-E-A-T in Financial Services

In fintech and cryptocurrency, trust is often the deciding factor between interest and action. Users are making decisions involving money, transactions, and financial security, which means credibility cannot be treated as an afterthought.

That reality made experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness central to every content decision. Rather than chasing traffic alone, I focused on creating content that answered questions clearly, demonstrated genuine knowledge, and earned user confidence over time.

Mapping Content to Conversion Pathways

Traffic without direction rarely produces meaningful business outcomes. Every content asset was designed to support a specific stage of the customer journey, whether that involved education, evaluation, conversion, or retention.

That alignment created a stronger connection between visibility and business performance, ensuring content contributed to measurable growth rather than vanity metrics.

What I Would Do Differently

If I were starting again today, I would invest earlier in broader authority-building content around fintech, digital finance, and emerging payment technologies. While transactional content delivered strong early results, broader topical authority could have accelerated trust and visibility even faster.

I would also create a tighter feedback loop between customer support and content strategy. Some of the most valuable content opportunities came directly from recurring customer questions, and formalising that process earlier would have uncovered additional growth opportunities sooner.

The Takeaway for Nigerian Fintech

Many fintech companies still treat SEO as something to explore after paid acquisition, partnerships, and performance marketing are already established. My experience led me to a different conclusion.

Organic search remains one of the few channels capable of building trust, educating customers, generating qualified traffic, and compounding over time. That combination is particularly valuable in fintech, where confidence often influences conversion as much as product functionality.

This does not mean paid acquisition should be abandoned. Paid channels remain important and often play a critical role in growth. The real lesson is that sustainable acquisition comes from balancing channels that deliver immediate results with channels that continue creating value long after the initial investment.

If your product solves a genuine problem, people are probably already searching for answers related to it. The opportunity is not simply to rank for those searches but to become the most trusted answer available. In a market where competition continues to intensify and acquisition costs keep rising, that may be one of the most valuable advantages a fintech company can build.

About the Author

Fiyinfolu Adekunle is a product marketing professional with more than six years of experience across fintech, digital payments, cryptocurrency, growth strategy, SEO, lifecycle marketing, and go-to-market execution. He holds an MSc in Digital Marketing from the University of Chester Business School, United Kingdom, and has led growth initiatives across high-growth fintech products serving thousands of users.