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.
Visit websiteA selection of key statistics from this project:
Having conquered the UK market with over 39 physical stores, this off-the-peg wedding dress retailer wanted to expand their proposition into new territories in the EU, whilst maintaining their dominant organic search foothold for key terms such as "wedding dresses" and "bridal shops".
The challenge would include a complex multi-territory migration of five existing websites into a single top-level domain with supporting folder structure for each territory.
Each territory would need translations, localisations, and optimisation of content to grow organic search visibility in Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium, whilst maintaining visibility for the United Kingdom.
A supporting local search strategy would also be required for the rollout plan of 20 new stores across Europe to ensure that each new store performed well organically at a local level.
How we did it
Our technical SEO experts migrated five existing websites for United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium into one top-level domain, with country specific folder structures.
Our international strategy utilised wed2b.com for the United Kingdom as the primary territory, with a corresponding folder structure for all other territories as follows:
This approach ensured that all territories would benefit from the primary territory, by sharing authority whilst enabling internationalisation and localisation of each store's content for each country.
Following a robust migration strategy allowed us to mitigate the risks of migrating not just one site, but five, into a single top-level domain.
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 by 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 category pages, store pages, and product pages, to primary content, and blog content.
Native translations and thorough up-front keyword research by territory allowed us to capitalise on search opportunity, build trust signals in new territories, improve the user experience, 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."
