Most discussions about Nigerian marketplaces focus on the product layer — categories, listings, payments. Less talked about is a harder problem underneath it: how do you make a service searchable and trustworthy in the same way a product is?
A product has a price, a photo, and a description. It either matches what the buyer wants or it doesn't. A service — an electrician, a tailor, a photographer — is fuzzier. Quality varies job to job, trust matters more than spec sheets, and "search" has to answer a completely different question: not "does this match what I want" but "can I trust this person to do what I need."
Here's how that translates into actual technical decisions.
- Profiles need to behave like products, but aren't A seller profile (a person or small business) and a product listing (an item) look similar on the surface — both need a title, an image, a location, contact info. But they diverge fast:
- Products are mostly static once posted. Profiles are living — reviews accumulate, past jobs get added, availability changes.
- Products get indexed and ranked mostly on relevance + price. Profiles need trust signals (ratings, response time, verification status) weighted into ranking.
- A product page's SEO job is "describe this exact item." A profile page's SEO job is "describe this person's skill + location + niche" — closer to a local business listing than a product page. This means the data model can't just reuse the product schema with a different label. Profiles need their own schema: skill tags, service area, response time, verification state — fields a generic product table was never built to hold.
Discovery is a local-search problem, not a catalog-search problem
Searching "iPhone 13" works fine with keyword matching. Searching "electrician near me" is a different problem entirely — it's local intent, and it needs:Location-aware ranking (distance, service radius — not just city-level matching)
Category taxonomies that map to real trades, not retail categories (a "Plumbing" category needs different filters than "Electronics")
Fallback behavior when there's no exact local match — show the next-closest verified professional rather than nothing
This is closer to how Google Maps or Yelp rank local businesses than how a typical e-commerce search engine ranks SKUs.Trust signals carry more SEO weight than they look like they should
For service pages specifically, schema.org markup matters more than people expect. Structured data for LocalBusiness or Service types — ratings, service area, business hours — directly affects how a profile appears in search results (star ratings, location snippets). For a marketplace with thousands of individual seller/professional pages, getting this right at the template level (once) is far more valuable than optimizing any single listing.Duplicate-content risk multiplies fast at this scale
If every seller profile or service category shares the same boilerplate meta title and description, search engines start treating hundreds (or thousands) of pages as near-duplicates of each other — which actively suppresses indexing across the board, not just for a few pages. At scale, this is one of the most common technical SEO issues in service marketplaces: unique meta data per profile and category isn't a nice-to-have, it's a requirement once you're past a few hundred listings.
Where this is heading
Platforms like Blinkers Nigeria are a useful case study because they didn't start as service marketplaces — they started as general classifieds and are evolving into something closer to a hybrid: products and skilled professionals, discoverable through the same interface, but increasingly requiring separate technical treatment under the hood.
The interesting engineering problem isn't "how do we list more things." It's "how do we make a person's skill as searchable, trustworthy, and indexable as a product" — and that's a data modeling and SEO problem before it's anything else. You can see the services category in production here: Blinkers Nigeria Services.
How technology connects customers with skilled professionals.
