SEO Switzerland

On a recent road trip to Switzerland one of the things that really stood out was the sheer number of cars in Switzerland with their own, or their companies' websites emblazoned on the back of the car, way higher percentage than we have seen traveling any other country thus far, which in itself is not surprising, as the Swiss are in general a sophisticated and technologically aware and web-savvy nation..

It therefore came as a great surprise to us just how wide open the SEO searches there are, a Google search for "SEO Switzerland" basically shows only one or maybe two real SEO consultants on the first page at all, and they are surrounded by content farms and "SEO Switzerland" pages on sites that are not in fact in Switzerland, nor even especially focused in anyway on the country, except as another location landing page, along with every other country they could think of.

Now as anyone who has been paying attention knows, SEO + Location Google searches are so low in commercial intent as to be virtually useless in so far as actually getting new generic business there, however if you're the first site there they can be very useful for building a strong brand :)

So of course, it's all very well having a site up that ranks for it's name, but as we know that is not going to drive any significant business, until people are actually looking for you by that name, so we are now now going to use exactly the same techniques in Switzerland as we have done successfully in Ibiza, to start opening up the Swiss SEO market, from the inside.

When you are first starting out in the SEO business, like it or not, you have something to prove.

Question: Why should anybody trust, and especially pay you to optimize their Swiss website when you have no visible proof you can do what you say?

Answer: They probably shouldn't, and in practice, most will not.

From a customer's perspective, how do they know you can deliver? Why would they not go to an established company with a proven track record? Of course you can possibly deliver the same service at a fraction of the cost of a large SEO Agency, but convincing someone to trust you and let you prove it can prove tricky.

Solution: Do a Bang-Up job for someone influential for FREE

On the sole condition that if they are happy they will then tell everybody they know about you and how wonderful you are. 

1. Find a relatively successful small business in your target location, who are not maximising their online potential, and whom you are sure you can help, and convince them to let you sort it out for them, for nothing, asking only for them to put in a good word about you to all their friends.
2. Do a really great job, go to town on it, way over and above the call of duty.
3. Keep in constant contact with them over the course of the project, sending them the odd link to see their new rankings, and analytics reports of their improved traffic to the site. If you have done as well as you should have, they should have already seen improved business over the period, and referrals will start rolling in as they will not be able to shut up about how good you are, whilst out at dinner parties, at work to their contacts, etc etc.

Trust us, this works, the time you put in to the free work will repay you many many times over with new business for years to come.

So as we have a multilingual consultant on the ground in Switzerland we are going to treat this as an entirely new company and not leverage any of our SEO Ibiza clients or experience, and are now following our own referral marketing advice above, by relaunching the site of a friend of a friend in Switzerland with a brand new pre-optimized Wordpress SEO website - who is a massage therapist in Interlaken, Switzerland hence:

Massage-Interlaken.com

The original site is in German only, on a .ch domain, and difficult to adjust what we needed to, therefore in this instance it was judged far quicker and easier (and will give a vastly superior end result) to rebuild it in Wordpress on a domain that will work internationally, and allow the client the flexibility to maintain the site herself, rather than attempt to optimize the old one, where we really would have been trying to "polish a turd" :) The site is now (on 1st April 2011) a grand total of 24 hours old, and having been in the Google index for approximately 18 hours is doing exactly what it was built for..

To anybody with a keen interest in SEO who has made it this far down, at this point we will now be completely honest about the purposes of this hub, apart from promoting the two sites above, it is also dually functioning as a SERP strength test into the "SEO Switzerland" results, with the intention of assessing how Hubpages.com has been affected in the latest round of Google algo updates, and especially when compared against a new exact match domain, much as we did here last summer - Ibiza scooter hire. And we'll also keep you updated with referrals and new Swiss SEO clients as they arrive..

First Swiss based client arrives through referral, and it's a great site..

The Chedi Andermatt - 5 Star Hotel & Apartment Complex.

Now rinse and repeat, do a really good job for a smallish fee, blow them away and wait for more referrals.