The starting problem
Fulfilment sits near Basel. Merchandising sits in Zurich. The prior SEO retainer sat somewhere that treated DACH as one Google Sheet tab. Placements arrived from German coupon farms, EU “best kitchen gadgets” posts, and one French deal site that had auto-generated a /suisse/ path. Rank trackers pinned to Berlin looked oddly calm. Rank trackers pinned to Zurich did not.
The URLs that paid for salaries were category templates with CHF pricing and Swiss retailer comparisons — not the .de mirrors, not the homepage hero. Hreflang on two of those categories still pointed at a pan-EU catalogue. We refused to outreach until that was fixed. Teaching the index the wrong country is expensive charity.
The merchandising lead’s question was blunt: why does a shopper in Bern see our competitors cited in Swiss magazines while we show up in German bargain round-ups? That question became the brief.
How the campaign ran
Switzerland only. No “and we’ll keep Germany warm.” Prospect lists came from Swiss home, retail, and consumer-test titles in German and French. We did not translate a Berlin affiliate list and change the currency symbol.
Scoring weighed article language, whether the piece assumed Swiss retail reality, archive seriousness, and outbound neighbourhood. Domain metrics were filed. A modest Swiss magazine that shoppers in Fribourg already open beat a high-DR EU blog every time.
Pitch material stayed product-adjacent: return patterns on small appliances shipped inside Switzerland, how households actually compare cookware online, a fair comparison that named rivals. Category exact-match anchors were capped hard. Most live anchors read like something a journalist typed.
Monthly reporting showed live URL, destination, surrounding sentence, and whether the page still matched the agreement. Two .ch networks failed the outbound neighbourhood test and never received a second email.
Traffic through the engagement
Jan to Jun 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.
- Reported mentions16
- Contributed articles19
- Round-ups refused12
What changed
Combined organic on the three money categories rose 52 percent. Non-brand clicks in Swiss Search Console rose 41 percent. Brand was already doing fine; we left it out of the victory slide.
Swiss-language referring domains moved from 14 to 44. Small graph, right graph. Category phrases in Swiss SERPs improved enough that category managers stopped forwarding Berlin screenshots as evidence.
Operationally, the bigger win was briefing hygiene. Vendors now get a country, a URL set, and a language. The old DACH mega-sheet is archived, not reused.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| kochtöpfe online schweiz | #14 | #4 | +10 |
| mixstab kaufen CH | #21 | #8 | +13 |
| ustensiles cuisine suisse | #28 | #12 | +16 |
| schnellkochtopf schweiz preis | #17 | #7 | +10 |
Prospects we turned down
- EU blogs with a single Swiss sentence bolted on.
- Coupon and cashback networks with thin country stubs.
- Any host whose outbound strip looked like a paid client directory.
Two more categories are queued. Same market filter. No attempt to “also cover Austria this quarter.”
If Helvetia Cart expands into Germany later, that is a new campaign with a new list. Reusing Swiss hosts because they are “close enough” recreates the problem we were hired to unwind.
Filed 20 June 2025. Figures come from campaign reporting for Helvetia Cart.