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I reached #1 on Google for my most relevant keywords. That is for my real estate search weegee​.ch: I outrank the main player who was there for 20 years. I never imagined this would be possible I spent $0 for SEO tools and wrote no blog posts. How I got there 👇

When I launched 2.5 years ago I told Google to index my site and thought "that'll do, I will be on page 2 or 3". But I was on page 43. I got 0 traffic. Google told me my site is not mobile friendly (I forgot the viewport), I fixed this and hoped things would improve.

Problem was, that Google would not recrawl my site. I requested reindex through google search console but Google had no appetite in recrawling my site. It still warned me about the site being bad on mobile even though I fixed it weeks ago.

Now my site had too many pages. It is a shared flat search with thousands of crawled listings. Google won't spend lots of crawling budget on a fresh site. A SEO friend told me I should fix all on-site SEO problems so when Google eventually recrawls I would land on page 2-3.

I ran ahrefs' free site audit and fixed all problems. It took lots of time. After the next crawl my mobile issues were gone. But it still only crawled a few dozens pages and I still was on page 43. My SEO friend was baffled. Turns out he never did SEO for a fresh site.

In ahrefs SEO guide ahrefs.com/seo I learned I need backlinks. Their advice: Look where your competitor has backlinks from, email these sites and ask for a backlink. Semrush has a free tier with 10 actions per day. Downloading my competitors backlinks=1 action - easy!

I had no idea if this messaging would work, I never did cold emailling but I was curious enough. I started with smaller sites to test my messaging: I searched their email addresses, crafted every email personally to mention their site and avoid a "mass mailing feel".

I didn't get any reply. I thought that was it. Then after 2 weeks I got the first replies and my first backlinks. These were university sites which needed to forward my email a few times until it reached the webmaster.

One university even put my request into the agenda of their next weekly meeting. My request was approved and I got the backlink 😄