The brief
Spiti Attica sells paint, flooring, and small renovations content to households searching in Greek. The English site was fine. The Greek URLs were a translation layer with hreflang pointed at a generic English template for some pages. People in Attica searching “μπογιά μπάνιο” were not being helped by a London magazine, and they were not being helped by an English DIY blog with one translated paragraph.
The previous profile mixed English DIY blogs, European catalogues, and a couple of Greek posts that were fine. Rank tracking from a UK location looked unrelated to the business. Rank tracking from Athens on Greek queries showed the pages buried under big-box retailers and YouTube.
The brief had to name the audience: Greek-language search in Greece. Not English DIY with a language toggle. Not a pan-European interiors folder.
What we did
Hreflang and canonicals were corrected before outreach. We will not pitch a URL that still tells search systems it is for an English catalogue. That month felt unproductive on a spreadsheet. It is the cheapest work in the engagement.
Publishers were Greek home titles, bilingual renovation desks that actually write in Greek, and a small set of local newsrooms that already cover housing. We looked at whether the article assumed Greek retailers, metric measurements, and Greek building practice. A beautiful English interiors blog was adjacent and still the wrong country for this brief.
Pitches offered practical pieces: how Greek households shop for paint, which labels actually matter, what a contractor quote in Greek should include. Anchors stayed descriptive. We did not force “αγορά μπογιά online” into every sentence.
Metrics were recorded. They did not rescue a host whose archive was English with a plugin translation. Those were declined even when DR looked comforting.
Sessions across the engagement
Mar to Jul 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 mentions13
- Contributed articles10
- Expert quotes6
What moved
Greek organic sessions on the landing pages rose 41 percent. The mix of hosts that actually helped was mostly Greek home media, not English DIY titles. Zero English-only DIY blogs were used as a proxy. That restraint is visible in the referring-domain chart.
Rankings on a handful of commercial-informational hybrids improved. Big-box retailers still occupy the obvious product queries. The work was never going to knock those over in five months. It was going to make Spiti Attica look like a source those results pages already understand.
The in-house team now separates Greek reporting from English catalogue reporting. That sounds obvious. It is the mistake most international programmes still make.
Greek home queries are messy on purpose. Some searchers mix English product names with Greek modifiers. Some want a big-box retailer. Some want a how-to. We did not try to win the queries that are already a retailer carousel. We took the hybrids (paint in a bathroom, reading a contractor quote, vinyl flooring explained in Greek) where a brand page can still be a source. That is a narrower win. It is also a win you can keep.
Measurement stayed attached to the Greek templates. A combined “all languages” view in Analytics was turned off for this engagement because it mixed English catalogue traffic into the story. If a session came from the English DIY leftover, it was interesting and not the brief. The monthly chart in this write-up is the Greek landing pages only. Anything else would have been a prettier lie.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| μπογιά μπάνιο | #19 | #8 | +11 |
| δάπεδο βινυλίου | #26 | #11 | +15 |
| πώς διαβάζω προσφορά ανακαίνισης | #14 | #6 | +8 |
| μπογιά εσωτερικού χώρου υγρασία | #33 | #13 | +20 |
What we declined
- English-only DIY blogs with a translated block.
- European interior magazines used as a language proxy.
- Plugin-translated English archives with a comforting DR.
A second phase will add two city-level guides. Same audience. Same refusal to flatten the market into an English DIY campaign.
Greek search will keep mixing English product names into Greek queries. The campaign does not need to purify that. It needs to cite pages that already live in that mix: Greek desks, Greek retailers in the examples, measurements a hardware aisle in Attica actually uses. Anything else is an English campaign wearing a different hreflang tag.
The ranking table is those hybrid queries only. Retailer head terms were tracked and left out of the win column, so a supermarket carousel could not be mistaken for a campaign result.
Written 22 July 2025. Figures are from the campaign reporting for Spiti Attica.