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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 crafted my messaging: My shared flat search is bigger and better than my competitors, linking to my site improves their site as they can offer their visitor a better service (this is called "skyscraper technique"). Plus I'm a single programmer who built this on the weekend.

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 😄

So I reached out to more websites: From 50 I reached out to I got back 12 backlinks. This was enough for Google to take me more seriously: They crawled more pages and more frequently and even more importantly: I climbed up to the first page.