DISCLAIMER: Just so we are clear, I was not looking for any sugar mummies.
A while ago, someone on the SEO team at Hotels.ng discovered that in the month of May, 13 persons came into our site from Google after searching “Sugar mummy” and landed on one of these 3 hotels: https://hotels.ng/hotels/search?query=sugar
Anyway, I was doing some topical keyword research when I noticed this:
Those are the top Sugar mummy related searches in Nigeria. So I popped in Sugar daddy into my keyword tool, and there was a low search volume for this search term in Nigeria.
So I began to wonder if people ever search for Sugar daddy in other countries.
Using keyword.io (a free keyword research tool), I discovered that there are 550,000 global searches for “Sugar daddy” and 60,500 global searches for “Sugar mummy”
After this observation, I tried to find other colloquial meanings of “Sugar mummy” to see if people might have been searching with those terms globally instead of “Sugar mummy”, and only “Cougars” came close. It turns out that both “Cougar” and “Sugar mummy” have somewhat different meanings.
The next place I could turn to was Google trends. I plugged in Sugar mummy and this has been the global trend for Sugar mummy in the last 5 years:
The curious bit is that this global trend is being led by Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Zambia. See below:
Then I did a comparison of global searches for both “Sugar daddy” and “Sugar mummy”.
At this point, it has become clear that there are a lot of Sub Saharan African men looking for rich older women on the internet than anywhere else in the world.
And there are a whole lot more Nigerian men looking for rich, older women on the internet than there are Nigerian women looking for rich older men on the internet.
I took my “Sugar mummy” search to Twitter, Facebok, bloomberry, and Nairaland, and it was no different from what Google had told me.
This realization brought me to one site in particular — sugarmummysite.com
The site admin had discovered a niche for himself and literally gamed Google with black hat SEO tactics.
It was clear this guy understood topical keyword relevance, he understood that Google does not rank websites, but rather Google ranks pages, and he had created a page for each of these keyword searches. All of these keywords have reasonable search volume and his pages rank number one for all of these keywords globally.
You can click here to see the organic keyword breakdown of this site: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mC16UXa2T8VM4bH5H55lrszA7s18rph2bxQ9G1uxmGI/edit?usp=sharing
It’s also a known fact that websites that rank in position 1 — 3 for a search query typically get 60% of the clicks.
At this point, I am beginning to think some crude SEO agency from India discovered this keyword niche and they are trying to cash in on the African Sugar mummy search market, so I investigate further.
I plug in this website in wayback machine and nothing comes up. I do a Whois search and the site admin has a private whois.
Fortunately, I discover that the domain name was redirected from sugarmummy.com.ng last month. I plugin the redirected domain name into wayback machine and discover this site has been in existence since 2016. I do the whois look up, and viola the culprit is a Nigerian man from Akwa Ibom. It’s a good thing Google street view is not in Akwa Ibom.
I figured that if he was running this sort of website and it was this easy to find him that he would be committing a whole lot SEO atrocities on the internet, and truly he was. I was able to discover all the websites in his private blog network with his adsense ID. 2 of which I quickly found: moneyforbloggers.com and makemoneyonline.com.ng
Which brings me to my conclusion, Google has utterly failed the user (people in search of sugar mummies), the site admin does not care to provide any actual information or service on how to get sugar mummies plus the site admin can hardly create a coherent sentence, and the user is left at their wits end because they believe the site admin really cares about connecting them with a sugar mummy (only if they knew).
The question then is 3 fold:
- Where are all the sugar babies?
- Who will save all these sugar boys?
- To what extent can you game the Google algo?
At this point, I am just glad his website does not have any form of remarketing set up because I am not sure how I would explain to my colleagues why I have NSFW ads following me around.
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