Multi-territory store expansion into Germany, Belgium & Netherlands for UK's largest bridal fashion giant

WED2B

Project Overview

Following the successful implementation of our award-winning SEO and digital strategy which saw WED2B rise to position 1 in organic search for ‘wedding dresses’ in the UK, our partner appointed Herd to deliver a multi-territory store expansion project.

The bridal fashion brand wanted to achieve greater visibility in organic search across Europe, complimenting their new EU brick-and-mortar store rollout.

Herd's strategy launched a multi-store international expansion project, delivering fully translated and localised expansion sites in Germany, Belgium, Ireland and Netherlands.

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Results

A selection of key statistics from this project:

+141% increase in SEO visibility
+327% local search traffic growth
+6,375% increase in sessions

The Brief

Having conquered the UK market with over 26 physical stores, and dominating search results by achieving position 1 online for their eCommerce store thanks to our successful digital strategy and ongoing SEO support, this off-peg wedding dress retail giant wanted to expand their eCommerce offer to new EU territories under one store.

Our challenge was a complex multi-territory migration of 3 top level domains onto a
sub-folder structure on a single .com domain.

We would then need to translate, localise and optimise content for international territories and to grow organic search visibility in Germany, Netherlands and Belgium as and when physical stores were rolled out.

We also needed to set up Google Business profiles in all 3 international territories to optimise for local search and google map pack.

How we did it

Our expert Shopify developers migrated 3 separate domains for Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium onto one top level domain, with country specific sub-folder structure.

This international domain structure on a .com/de-de for Germany, /nl-nl (Netherlands), fr-be (French for Belgium) and /en-ie (Ireland) would benefit all territories by sharing link equity to improve rankings in search engines and enable internationisation and localisation of each store's content for each country.

Our team of native German, French and Dutch translators conducted multilingual keyword research by territory, collating a glossary of key terms in order to optimise on-page content in organic search in each country, and to ensure consistency in translation across each language.

We then manually translated and localised over 400 pages of store content into German, French, and Dutch, including everything from collection pages, branch directories and product pages, to primary content, and blog content, to improve the UX, trust signals and ultimately increase conversion rates in local markets.

Full site translation, localisation and accuracy was vital to our client as market research and our own experience tells us that potential customers are much more likely to convert for high value purchases when the site is translated into their native language.

Herd played an instrumental part in our international roll-out project into Germany, Belgium, Ireland and Netherlands, setting up our international domain structure, maximising our international SEO potential, and delivering over 400 hours of translation and localisation support.

Their post launch translation support for new content and their ability to meet our often tight deadlines was also second to none."

Carey Winder, Website & Search Manager, WED2B

Project Highlights

1

International SEO

We implemented multilingual URLs, hreflang tags, search engine friendly site structure, geo-tagging and multilingual keyword research amd use of meta content language to maximise organic visibility upon launch.

2

International domain structure

We implemented an international SEO friendly domain structure on a .com root domain with sub-folders for overseas territories

3

Multilingual Content Management

With WED2B operating in 5 territories and 4 languages it is very much about managing content efficiently at scale through methodical audits, optimisations and process. Input extends to ideation, reviews and content strategy recommendations supporting SEO & user experience.

4

Translation & localisation

A core part of WED2B’s expansion plan was entry into Europe with the launch of local territory websites. Our approach to localisation means that we utilised international SEO skills paired with native translators and our Head of international's expertise to manually translate and tailor content to ensure it was not only 100% accurate in each target language, but also culturally relevant to each market and also targeted localised searches.

5

Local Search

We established a strong store presence through Google My Business optimisation building store citations with syndication to local directories. With optimisations to the store directory we helped the site achieve top positions for top terms on local search engines and appear in top positions in the map pack.