A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Sankofa Pathways · Scholarship & study-abroad platform · Accra
+256%
organic sessions over 9 months · Technical SEO · Accra, Ghana
01 · The challenge
Sankofa, “go back and fetch it”
A scholarship database generated thousands of thin, expired listings on slow mobile pages in a market where most users are on low-bandwidth phones.
Sankofa Pathways lists scholarships and study-abroad programmes for students in Ghana and across West Africa. Every funding cycle added hundreds of pages and none were ever retired, so Google spent its visits on closed opportunities while new ones waited days to be found. The students it serves search on data-capped phones — a 3.8MB page costs them real money before it shows a deadline.
Sankofa means going back for what was left behind. That was the brief: go back through every old listing and decide, deliberately, what each one should become.
02 · Audit & diagnosis
Nkyinkyim, “the journey twists”
71%
of Googlebot requests went to expired listings or filter URLs, from 90 days of server logs.
186k
crawlable filter combinations (country × level × field × sort), none canonicalised.
11 days
median time for a new listing to be first crawled — deadlines were passing before indexing.
4,000
listing pages from one template; 2,900 past their deadline but still returning 200 OK.
64 words
median unique copy per listing: name, a date and a funder logo.
0
hub pages for the queries students actually type, like “masters scholarships in the UK for Ghanaians”.
None
no breadcrumb, list or grant markup; deadlines lived inside images on 38% of listings.
1,200
listings with a deadline in the title that disagreed with the date on the page.
3.8MB
median mobile page — a hero carousel, four web-font families and nine third-party tags.
6.1s
field LCP at the 75th percentile, on the low-end Android phones most visitors use.
03 · The strategy
Dwennimmen, “strength with humility”
Built on our Signal plan (technical seo): fix how Google moves through the site first, then make every page it lands on worth the trip.
Thread 01
One template, rebuilt so each listing earns its place: eligibility by nationality, award amount, required documents, deadline and past-cycle dates as text. A listing is only indexable once it has the fields that answer the query. 212 hubs (country × study level) gather live listings for the searches with real demand.
Thread 02
Filter parameters blocked in robots.txt and canonicalised to the hub; sitemaps split into live, reopening and archived, with only live submitted and lastmod kept honest. Every live listing sits within two clicks of the home page.
Thread 03
BreadcrumbList everywhere, ItemList on hubs and MonetaryGrant on listings (funder, amount, validity). Not a rich-result type — it makes funder and deadline unambiguous to machines, and the deadline in the title is generated from the same field.
Thread 04
Built for a phone on two bars: system fonts, no carousel, AVIF images at phone widths, third-party tags cut from nine to two and loaded after interaction. A 640KB budget enforced in CI.
Every listing past its deadline goes down exactly one path. The rule now runs nightly.
Recurring scheme
301 to the scheme’s evergreen hub
1,640
One-off, closed for good
410 Gone, removed from sitemaps
980
Reopening on a known date
Kept, noindex, reopening date shown
280
Mock-up of a mobile result for “chevening scholarship deadline”.
Before · not in top 100
sankofa-pathways.example › listing › 4471
Chevening 2023/24 | Sankofa Pathways
Applications are now closed. Sankofa Pathways — the best scholarships…
After · position 9
sankofa-pathways.example › uk › masters › chevening
Chevening Scholarship: deadline, amount & eligibility for Ghanaian students
Next deadline 4 Nov. Fully funded one-year master’s in the UK. Documents you need and past-cycle dates.
04 · 9 months on the loom
Nsoromma, “a guiding star”
Drag the shuttle, or pick a month, to see the cloth as it stood and what the crawl looked like at that point.
Month 9 of 9
Expiry rules run nightly from the database; the team gets a runbook and a crawl-health report.
05 · Results
Adinkrahene, “greatness, leadership”
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Organic sessions
Index, baseline month = 100 · +256% organic sessions
Student sign-ups per month
410 at baseline → 898 in month 9 · +119%
Mobile page weight, by resource
3.8MB → 640KB
before3.8MB
after640KB
Expired listings handled
2,900 of 4,000 listings · each square = 20 listings
LCP · p75 mobile
2.1s from 6.1s
Line marks the “good” threshold (2.5s)
INP · p75 mobile
160ms from 480ms
Line marks the “good” threshold (200ms)
CLS · p75 mobile
0.03 from 0.31
Line marks the “good” threshold (0.1)
Google.com.gh, mobile, month 0 vs month 9. Modelled positions.
| Query | Page type | Before | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| scholarships for ghanaian students 2027 | Hub | 34 | 2 |
| daad scholarship application ghana | Listing | 22 | 2 |
| fully funded scholarships for ghanaian students | Hub | 41 | 3 |
| commonwealth scholarship requirements | Listing | 29 | 4 |
| study in germany from ghana | Guide | 37 | 5 |
| masters scholarships in uk for africans | Hub | 58 | 6 |
| chevening scholarship deadline | Listing | — | 9 |
| undergraduate scholarships in canada for international students | Hub | 76 | 14 |
06 · Your turn
Sankofa, “go back and fetch it”
Thousands of pages, a crawl that never reaches the good ones, phones on slow connections — Signal is built for exactly that.
← Back to all case studies