The starting problem
Customers search from Zurich, Winterthur, and along the Aargau corridor. The .de catalogue was healthy. The Swiss pages were a translation layer; two templates still canonicalised toward a generic German URL. Someone searching “farbe badzimmer feuchtigkeit” from Zurich was not helped by a Hamburg magazine, and not helped by a German DIY blog that had pasted one Swiss paragraph for “coverage.”
The old profile mixed German how-to blogs, European interior catalogues, and a few Swiss posts that already worked. Berlin rank tracking was a distraction. Zurich tracking on Swiss queries showed big-box retailers and video results burying the brand pages.
We named the audience out loud in the kickoff: German-language search inside Switzerland. Not German DIY with a language switch. Not a pan-DACH interiors programme.
How the campaign ran
Month one fixed hreflang and canonicals. Spreadsheet activity looked quiet. Outreach on a URL that still claimed to be for Germany is how you pay twice.
Publishers: Swiss home and renovation titles, bilingual desks that actually write for Swiss readers, local housing coverage in Zurich and Bern. We checked whether articles assumed CHF, Swiss retailers, and Swiss building practice. Pretty German interiors blogs stayed adjacent and out of scope.
Pitches stayed practical — how Swiss households shop paint, which labels matter under local rules, what a Zurich contractor quote should contain. Anchors stayed descriptive. We did not hammer commercial exact matches into every sentence.
High DR on a plugin-translated German archive with a /ch/ path did not get anyone onto the pitch list. Metrics cannot launder the wrong country.
Traffic through the engagement
Feb to Jul 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 mentions14
- Contributed articles10
- Expert quotes7
What changed
Organic on the Swiss landing set rose 45 percent. Hosts that moved the needle were mostly Swiss home media. Zero DE-only DIY blogs were used as proxies — visible in the referring mix.
A cluster of commercial-informational hybrids improved. Obvious product head terms stayed with big-box. Five months was never going to flip those. The job was to look like a source the Swiss results page already understands.
Internal reporting now splits Swiss home from German catalogue. That split is boring and overdue.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| farbe badzimmer feuchtigkeit | #20 | #8 | +12 |
| vinylboden kaufen schweiz | #26 | #11 | +15 |
| offerte renovierung zürich | #15 | #6 | +9 |
| peinture salle de bain humidité | #29 | #13 | +16 |
Prospects we turned down
- German DIY blogs with a bolted-on Swiss block.
- EU interiors magazines used as country stand-ins.
- Plugin-translated DE archives with comforting metrics.
Next phase adds city guides for Zurich and Basel under the same audience rule.
Swiss queries will keep mixing English product names with German modifiers. We do not purify that. We cite pages that already live in it: Swiss desks, Swiss examples, aisle reality from a Migros Bau+Hobby run, not a German DIY scrapbook wearing a different hreflang.
Filed 31 July 2025. Figures come from campaign reporting for Wohnen Zürich.