Overview

Merchants came to us at a time when they were looking to expand from a relatively saturated local market into international territories. There were however a few obstacles to overcome before we could even kick off the international SEO strategy.

Productisation

Like many large corporate leaders in their category, Merchants internal product language and categorisation had surpassed industry norms, often driven by a need to invent new categories. We conducted keyword research and ran multiple workshops to refine their offering and build out a product/service set that aligned with user search intent, i.e. matching their products to high volume keywords people were actually using.

Web Development

With the productisation finalised, we looked to build out an entirely new UX to improve user journey. A new website was crafted from the ground up, with both SEO-first and mobile-first principles at the forefront, utilising design aesthetic and simple UI to optimise conversion rate. We were required to register a new domain and manage the migration and redirect strategy, which went off without a hitch.

SEO Strategy

International SEO

Our approach to international strategy was simple – craft localised versions of the Merchants website, with copy across these site versions entirely rewritten to include local-market keyword research and optimisation.

Applying hreflang tags and auto IP location based language suggestions to these new site versions, then verifying and monitoring results in Google Search Console, ensured that we had the best chances of ranking in these local markets.

Results

We were incredibly happy with the traction the strategy gained from early on, and so was our client! An overall 164% increase in overall Organic Traffic, with new markets achieving increases of:

• UK – 207%
• Australia – 1,182%
• Canada – 283%