Page views in the first full year: 0 to 1.6 million from a new domain

The opportunity

Every term, tens of thousands of Nigerian teachers, school owners and parents search for the same thing: the scheme of work for a specific class and subject. “JSS1 scheme of work.” “SS1 biology scheme of work.” “Primary 4 mathematics scheme of work.” The demand is huge, it repeats every resumption, and it is very specific.

When I looked at who was ranking for those searches, the answer was established education portals and blogs such as MySchool.ng, EduDelight, Schoolings.org and AllSchool.ng, with newer players like HeadTeacher.ng arriving later. They covered everything from admission news to exam tips, and schemes of work were one topic among hundreds, usually a single long post rather than a page per class and subject. Nobody had built a site that owned the intent end to end.

Then the Syllabus.ng domain turned out to be available. A domain that literally named what people were looking for, on Nigeria’s own extension, was too good to leave on the table. We registered it and set out to build the most complete, best organised scheme of work and syllabus resource in the country.

There was a second reason. I had been teaching SEO and content to a group of interns, and I wanted them to learn on something real, with real rankings and real users, rather than exercises. Syllabus.ng became their training ground and, in time, the project they put at the top of their own portfolios.

Architecture before a single article

The first thing we did was not write. We drew the site. The rule was simple: any page on Syllabus.ng had to be reachable within two clicks of the home page. That keeps link equity flowing to every page, makes crawling easy, and means a teacher never has to hunt.

The main navigation has just five doors: Exam Syllabus, Professional Certification, Primary Scheme of Work, JSS Scheme of Work and SSS Scheme of Work. Every menu item opens straight onto a hub. We organised everything class by class: JSS1 to JSS3, SS1 to SS3, Basic 1 to Basic 6 and the nursery classes. Each hub was built to rank for its own head term, such as “JSS1 scheme of work”, because that is exactly how people search.

Each hub does more than list links. The SS1 hub opens with a short explanation of what the year is for, then groups its 28 subjects into core, science and technology, business, humanities and trade subjects. Every subject has two links side by side: the free scheme of work and the paid lesson notes for that subject. Breadcrumbs, links to the neighbouring classes and the main exam syllabuses, and article and organisation schema complete the page.

Going after the long tail, subject by subject

Under every class hub we built a page for every subject taught in that class, each on a clean URL such as syllabus.ng/ss1-scheme-of-work/biology. Senior secondary has more than 25 subjects, so SS1 to SS3 alone produced close to 80 pages. The junior secondary classes added almost 50 and the primary classes almost 100. With nursery included, the class structure alone gave us close to 300 tightly targeted pages, each aimed at a search with clear, repeat demand.

Every subject page follows the same template, which is what allowed a small team of interns to produce hundreds of them consistently. The SS1 Biology page, for example, is based on the Lagos State unified scheme of work and lays out all three terms as week-by-week tables of topics, followed by an assessment guide. Around that content sit the conversion points: a “Download Now” button, a banner for the complete SS1 Biology lesson notes, and an invitation to join our WhatsApp community.