The brief
Agora Line is a Greek generalist marketplace with a serious catalogue in home and kitchen. The SEO lead sat in Athens. The previous vendor sat in northern Europe and treated “international” as one folder. Placements arrived from English coupon sites, a couple of translated European round-ups, and deal networks that happened to have a /gr/ stub.
The pages that needed to rank were category URLs with Greek commercial language, not the English equivalents, and not the homepage. Rank tracking from a UK location looked accidentally decent. Rank tracking from Athens did not. That gap is the whole problem of this market: shared product photos, different index, different publishers, different currency in the copy.
Internal links and hreflang were messy. Some category templates canonicalised to the English catalogue. We would not outreach around a canonical that pointed at the wrong language. The first month of the engagement was a pause while those templates were fixed. Outreach into a wrong destination is how you teach the graph the wrong URL.
What we did
The brief named Greece only. English catalogue work, if it ever happens, is a second campaign. Prospect lists were built by reading Greek titles that already cover home, retail, and consumer tests, not by translating a pan-European list. Vocabulary in the pitches followed Greek usage (κατσαρόλα, μπλέντερ, χύτρα, and the commercial verbs their SERPs actually show).
We scored hosts on language, country assumed by the article, archive quality, and the usual metric trio (Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, Majestic TF) as a filing aid. Several useful Greek magazines look “small” in English-weighted tools. They were not small to the reader Agora Line wanted.
Angles were product-adjacent without becoming advertorial sludge: how Greek households actually buy small appliances online, return-rate patterns the editor could quote, and a comparison that named competitors fairly. Exact-match category anchors were capped. Most live anchors were phrases a writer would type.
Reporting was the live URL, the destination, the sentence, and whether the page was still the page we agreed. Two networks with Greek ccTLDs were declined after a look at the rest of the outbound links. A ccTLD is not a market.
Sessions across the engagement
Sep 2024 to Mar 2025. Organic is the destination URLs in this brief; referrals are clicks from accepted placements.
Organic sessions Referral sessions
What actually went live
Accepted URLs only. Declined prospects are not dressed up as a pipeline.
- Reported mentions15
- Contributed articles19
- Round-ups declined11
What moved
Three category pages that pay for the account moved. Combined organic sessions on those URLs were up 48 percent. Non-brand clicks in Search Console for Greece rose 39 percent. Brand clicks were already fine; they were not the object.
Greek-language referring domains went from 12 to 41. That is still a small graph. It is a graph that matches the query. Rankings on the commercial category phrases improved inside the Greek results, which is the only results page that matters for this brief.
The larger operational change was internal. Agora Line now briefs vendors with a country, a set of URLs, and a language. The previous “international folder” habit is how they got the mixed profile in the first place.
We also compared the Greek category SERPs month by month, not as a blended European screenshot. When a UK-location rank tracker still looked flattering, we ignored it. The only screenshot that entered the report was taken from Athens, on the query the page was built for. That sounds fussy. It is how you stop lying to yourself with a convenient location pin.
Content on the destination URLs was not rewritten by us. It did not need to be. The copy already used Greek commercial language. The missing object was the neighbourhood of citations. Once those arrived from hosts that already wrote about home and kitchen for Greek readers, the pages started to look like they belonged next to the results that were already ranking (retailers, publishers, and a couple of forums) rather than next to a translated European blog.
Selected queries
Positions from the market named in the brief. A dash means the URL was not ranking in the top 100 at the start.
| Query | Before | After | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| αγορά κατσαρόλες online | #14 | #5 | +9 |
| μπλέντερ τιμή Ελλάδα | #21 | #7 | +14 |
| χύτρα ταχύτητας online | #19 | #8 | +11 |
| μαγειρικά σκεύη online GR | #28 | #12 | +16 |
What we declined
- Translated European blogs used as a proxy for Greece.
- Coupon and deal networks with thin Greek stubs.
- Any placement whose other outbound links were a client list.
The work continues on two remaining categories. Same market. Same filter. No attempt to “cover southern Europe” in the same spreadsheet.
If Agora Line opens a second country later, it will be a second campaign with a second list. Reusing Greek hosts “because they are nearby” is the mistake this engagement was hired to stop. The charts above are Greece only. That is the entire point of showing them.
Written 28 March 2025. Figures are from the campaign reporting for Agora Line.