Nigeria's First Digital Bank Lost 90% of Its Search Rankings Overnight. Here Is How We Brought It Back — And Made Organic Their Biggest Growth Channel.
ALAT by Wema Bank is Nigeria's first fully digital bank — a pioneer that set the standard for digital banking in West Africa. Products include virtual dollar cards, instant loans, and children's savings accounts.
For a digital-first brand competing for terms like "digital bank in Nigeria", "virtual dollar card", and "quick loans", organic search visibility is not a marketing nice-to-have. It is the difference between sustainable growth and permanent dependence on paid acquisition.
What we walked into.
Migration Disaster
A poorly executed website migration wiped out over 1,000 keyword rankings overnight. 90% of ALAT's entire search presence was gone.
Invisible to Google
Broken redirect chains, canonical tag errors, and fractured site architecture left key pages inaccessible to crawlers.
Zero Organic Revenue
The brand relied entirely on paid search and offline activations. The previous agency was reporting SEM metrics as SEO results. The marketing team did not know the difference.
Five workstreams. Run in order.
Technical SEO Audit and Rebuild
Full audit identifying every broken redirect, canonical error, and broken internal link. Every issue resolved before anything else.
Site Architecture Restructuring
Reorganised the entire site around how Nigerians actually search for financial products. Clear hierarchies, logical crawl paths, authority concentrated on highest-value pages.
Landing Page Optimisation
Key product pages for digital banking, virtual dollar cards, instant loans, and children's savings rebuilt to match search intent precisely.
Content Creation and Syndication
Sustained content programme targeting informational and commercial keywords, published and syndicated across third-party platforms at scale.
Team Education and Internal Alignment
Helped ALAT's brand team understand the real difference between SEO and SEM, establishing the internal clarity that made long-term investment possible.
Three years of compounding rigour.
Organic Search became ALAT's single largest acquisition channel — outperforming Paid Search, Direct, and every other channel combined.
Three Years of Compounding Results.
Foundation
Technical audit conducted, migration damage assessed, foundation work begins.
Recovery
Architecture restructured, redirect and canonical issues resolved, rankings begin recovering.
Scale
Direct engagement formalised, landing page programme launched, content and syndication at scale.
Dominance
Organic becomes single biggest acquisition channel. 517.6% growth confirmed.
Ready to make organic your biggest growth channel?
Start with a free audit. We find exactly what is holding your site back and give you a clear roadmap to fix it — without the agency fees or the 6-month timelines.