The starting problem
Lernwerk Lab sells reading tools to Swiss schools and to parents from Bern. Marketing treated every URL as “education.” School procurement and parent consumer hubs shared templates and one outreach spreadsheet. A teacher-magazine mention landed on a URL that also pitched home licences. Search systems were being told the company had not chosen an audience.
Classroom intent and after-dinner parent intent use different vocabulary and different Swiss results pages. Mixed citations made both graphs look accidental.
Commercial wanted one blended report. They got two. A single “all education” chart would have hidden which hub actually moved.
How the campaign ran
On-site first: two honest hubs, clear internal linking, no universal URL. Outreach waited until those pages existed.
Two prospect lists from scratch. Schools: teacher magazines, school titles, national education desks. Parents: parenting titles, consumer education, family desks. A host useful for schools was not pasted into the parents sheet to save time.
Pitches matched practice — devices in a Swiss classroom, Lehrplan 21 notes, procurement cycles — or homework after 20:00, depending on the brief. Recycled German case studies were not the angle.
Metrics were compared within a hub, never as a blended DR average across audiences. Blended averages congratulate the wrong reader.
Traffic through the engagement
Dec 2024 to Aug 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.
- Schools placements18
- Parents placements15
- Shared (rare)2
What changed
Schools hub organic rose 47 percent. Parents rose 33 percent. Both from modest bases. School-year seasonality shows in the monthly chart; we did not flatten it for slides.
Referring domains that helped were audience-matched. A few general education titles appeared only when the article genuinely crossed both desks. Default remained no.
Board reporting now shows two hubs. The old single “Switzerland education SEO” slide is gone. That governance change outlasts any one placement.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| leseverständnis primarschule | #21 | #8 | +13 |
| lese software klasse schweiz | #27 | #11 | +16 |
| leseverständnis üben eltern | #18 | #7 | +11 |
| outils lecture école suisse | #24 | #10 | +14 |
Prospects we turned down
- One merged guest-post network for “all education.”
- Reusing school-desk copy in parent pitches.
- A single URL pretending to serve both audiences.
A Romandie hub is a third brief for next year — if the French page exists. It will not be a new row on the schools sheet.
Two hubs, two graphs, two reports. A product can be shared. A publisher list cannot.
Filed 22 August 2025. Figures come from campaign reporting for Lernwerk Lab.