The brief
Helios Metrics sells reporting software to operations teams. The English site ranked. The Greek templates (/el/proionta/ and a set of comparison pages) did not. In-house SEO had spent two years collecting guest posts on English marketing blogs, then translating the H1s. Search Console for the Greek host showed impressions on branded terms and almost nothing on the category phrases that pay for the sales team.
The referring-domain export looked healthy until we split it by language of the linking page. Eighty-one percent of the citations sat on English URLs. The Greek pages inherited a neighbourhood they did not belong to. Rank tracking in Athens showed the comparison URL stuck between positions 18 and 34, swapping places with forums and a US vendor whose Greek page was a thin translation.
The brief was not “more links.” It was: make the Greek URLs look like they belong in Greek search. That meant declining the leftover English inventory, naming Greece as the only market for this engagement, and building mentions from pages an Athens operations manager might actually open.
What we did
We started with the live Greek templates, not the English originals. Two comparison URLs and one category hub could carry a campaign. The rest of the /el/ tree was still mixing English navigation. Outreach paused on those until templates were finished. Mixing unfinished URLs into pitches is how you spend six months explaining 302s.
Publisher research stayed inside Greece. Trade titles covering logistics software, operations, and Greek SME finance. We read archives, outbound patterns, and whether bylines existed outside the CMS. Domain ratings were filed, not used as a gate. Several of the most useful hosts scored modestly in Ahrefs because the Greek graph is thinner in the tools. Moz DA and Majestic TF were checked in the same pass so a single vendor number could not veto a magazine a buyer already reads.
Pitches were written in Greek for named desks. The angle was not “we would like a backlink.” It was a method Helios could stand behind: how Greek mid-market teams actually assemble monthly operations reports, with a dataset the editor could quote. Guest posts were used where the publication still had a desk. Reported mentions were preferred when the title already covered the beat.
Every live URL was opened against the same list we publish on the homepage: language of the article, topical overlap, placement in a sentence that needs a source, and whether the rest of the outbound links looked like a neighbourhood or a client list. Two placements were declined after publication because the surrounding copy had been rewritten into a round-up of unrelated tools. They were not counted.
Sessions across the engagement
Jan to Jun 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 mentions17
- Contributed articles14
- Expert quotes7
What moved
By month six, Greek organic sessions on the two comparison URLs and the category hub were up 64 percent against the prior six months. Branded traffic moved less, which is what you want if the work is about discovery rather than people already searching the company name.
Queries in the Greek top ten went from 11 to 27. The commercial phrases that matter (λογισμικό reporting επιχειρήσεις, εργαλεία reporting Ελλάδα) moved from the second page into positions a sceptical sales lead will actually screenshot. Rankings are not a theatre of round numbers. They are attached to URLs.
Referral sessions from Greek hosts remained small in absolute terms and still useful as a quality signal: people clicked. The larger effect was the neighbourhood. Other Greek pages began citing Helios without us in the room, which is the unglamorous proof that the graph noticed.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| λογισμικό reporting επιχειρήσεις | #18 | #6 | +12 |
| εργαλεία reporting Ελλάδα | #24 | #8 | +16 |
| σύγκριση software operations | #31 | #11 | +20 |
| reporting ΜμΕ Ελλάδα | - | #9 | New |
What we declined
- English marketing blogs with a translated paragraph.
- A .gr network whose archive was identical contributed posts.
- Exact-match anchors that read like ad copy.
Helios still runs English campaigns. They are a different brief. The Greek work continues at a slower cadence: fewer URLs, same filter, no quota. If a month is quiet because two desks have not replied, the update is that sentence.
The ranking table in this write-up is attached to Greek URLs and Greek queries. English corporate rankings were already fine and are not shown, so nobody can average them into the story. A blended “global SaaS” chart would have hidden the only thing this campaign was for.
Written 30 June 2025. Figures are from the campaign reporting for Helios Metrics.