A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Case study · Signal · 8-month engagement
Felspar Bank
Digital bank for freelancers · New York · New York
01 · Pre-market
Faceted help-centre search created 200,000 crawlable URLs, so Google spent its time on junk and missed Felspar's high-intent guides.
Felspar Bank is a New York digital bank built for freelancers: business accounts, invoicing and tax set-asides in one app. Its help centre held some of the best free guidance on quarterly estimated taxes and invoicing on the web. Almost nobody found it through search.
Every filter on the help-centre search produced a new URL, and every URL was crawlable. Googlebot had a finite number of visits to spend on the site and spent most of them paging through near-identical result lists, while new guides waited weeks to be discovered and the ones it did find were slow to respond on a phone.
Where Googlebot spent its visits
Share of Googlebot requests to faceted /help/search URLs, from server logs. Green is crawl spent on guides and account pages.
02 · The trade
Built on our Signal plan (technical seo): fix how the site is crawled first, then make every page Google can now reach worth indexing, then make it fast.
Fifty thin state pages became fifty useful ones, built from data instead of boilerplate.
Close the faceted search to crawlers so Googlebot spends its visits on the guides.
Tell search engines exactly what each page is: a guide, a how-to or an account.
Stop the search widget from blocking every tap on a guide.
03 · Trading session
MONTH 1 · 09:30
Full crawl, 30 days of server logs and a Search Console export. The 200,412 faceted URLs mapped and sized.
MONTH 2 · 10:15
Robots rules and noindex shipped on /help/search. Internal links repointed to clean guide URLs.
MONTH 3 · 11:05
Sitemaps rebuilt to 1,840 canonical guides. Topic hubs give every guide a crawlable path within three clicks.
MONTH 4 · 12:00
Help-centre search loaded on interaction; bundle split. Mobile INP falls below 300 ms.
MONTH 5 · 13:20
Fifty state tax-deadline pages regenerated from data; the first twenty go live after the quality gate.
MONTH 6 · 14:10
Article, HowTo, BreadcrumbList and BankAccount markup deployed and validated across templates.
MONTH 7 · 15:00
120 profession-specific invoice templates published. Guide indexation passes 90%.
MONTH 8 · 16:00
Regression alerts for parameters and vitals, a runbook for the in-house team, and a quarter-ahead content plan.
04 · Closing prices
+148%
Organic account openings
-97%
Crawlable junk URLs
41% → 96%
Guide pages indexed
380ms → 140ms
INP (mobile)
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
FLSP.OPN · Organic account openings
▲ +148%
Organic account openings, indexed to the pre-engagement month (100). Lift follows the guides as they enter the index.
| Query | Vol/mo | Prev | Last | Chg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| quarterly estimated taxes freelancer | 12,100 | 38 | #3 | ▲ 35 |
| invoice template for freelancers | 9,900 | 27 | #2 | ▲ 25 |
| business bank account for freelancers | 6,600 | 19 | #4 | ▲ 15 |
| self-employed tax deductions checklist | 5,400 | 46 | #5 | ▲ 41 |
| 1099-nec what to do as a freelancer | 3,600 | 54 | #6 | ▲ 48 |
| late payment invoice wording | 1,900 | n/r | #7 | ▲ new |
| new york freelance isn’t free act invoice | 880 | n/r | #2 | ▲ new |
n/r: not ranking in the top 100. Modelled positions; volumes are illustrative US monthly estimates.
Closing bell
If crawlers are spending their time in the wrong corner of your site, Signal is where we start: logs, crawl paths, index coverage and vitals.