The starting problem
Fiducia’s product is payments for Swiss SMEs. The pages that needed airtime were educational: fee anatomy in francs, what “settlement” actually means on a Tuesday, how long a transfer takes when banks disagree. Those URLs live in YMYL territory. Compliance does not care about your average DR.
The inherited profile mixed English “top European fintechs” lists, a few German money blogs, and a thin set of Swiss pieces that were already acceptable. Demand and vocabulary are local — Überweisung, virement, CHF examples. English round-ups barely touched the Swiss results page.
Legal had burned a prior vendor for overclaiming. Our written constraint: no ranking promises, no year-stuffed “beste” headlines, contributed pieces labelled as such when required.
How the campaign ran
Publisher map stayed short: Zurich and Geneva business desks, SME banking titles, a handful of practitioner blogs with named authors who exist offline. Volume was never the product. Survivability was.
Every prospect was read end-to-end. Language, country assumption, corrections culture, outbound neighbourhood, then metrics as paperwork. A few high-DR hosts sold obvious slots; Majestic trust looked hollow; they were cut before first contact.
Pitches offered an expert who could discuss settlement friction without second-person sales copy. Contributed drafts went through legal before send. Quoted mentions were preferred when the desk already owned the beat. Anything that demanded a pricing table dressed as journalism died in week one.
Cadence: one thoughtful pitch, one follow-up, then stop. Silence from a Bern business editor is data. We did not recycle a declined idea onto a sister brand in the same publisher group.
Traffic through the engagement
Jan to Sep 2025. Organic covers the destination URLs in this brief; referrals are clicks from accepted placements.
Organic sessions Referral sessions
Placements that shipped
Accepted live URLs only. Declined prospects are not reported as pipeline.
- Expert quotes9
- Contributed articles6
- Reported mentions4
What changed
Nineteen placements cleared legal. Seventy-one percent of the long list never saw a pitch. That ratio is the campaign working, not under-delivery.
Organic on the three guide URLs rose 44 percent. Informational Swiss queries improved; hard transactional terms moved less — matching the pages we had. Referral sessions were small and serious: people arriving mid-article, not from a sidebar widget.
Compliance now keeps a folder of live URLs they will open in procurement reviews. That folder is a different deliverable from a metric PDF.
Queries we tracked
Positions for the market named in the brief. A dash means the URL was outside the top 100 at the start.
| Query | Before | After | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| überweisung kosten unternehmen | #16 | #7 | +9 |
| délai virement suisse PME | #14 | #5 | +9 |
| gebühren zahlungen schweiz | #23 | #9 | +14 |
| settlement erklärung KMU | #27 | #12 | +15 |
Prospects we turned down
- Global fintech listicles and award mills.
- German personal-finance blogs used as a Switzerland stand-in.
- Headlines that ranked the product with a calendar year glued on.
Phase two adds one more educational URL under the same legal gate. No second-country expansion “because German is already there.”
YMYL work is scored by what you can defend in a room with lawyers present. The declined column in the placement chart is part of the proof, not an apology.
Filed 18 September 2025. Figures come from campaign reporting for Fiducia Pay.