Achieving a big success on the Polish market, Faretti wanted to expand their customer base by entering the UK market. They turned to us for support and help with optimizing their brand new website (co.uk domain). Having the goal stated clearly, we focused on technical SEO, building brand recognition and increasing its visibility on the UK market.
Creating SEO strategies for clients who want to conquer foreign markets requires adopting a bit of a different approach – especially when a niche business comes into play 🙂 We had to figure out how search engine users look for elevator shoes in the given country. Later we could come up with relevant long-tail phrases to increase ranks and organic traffic for a new website.
The very first thing we absolutely had to do was to set up the right SEO tools.
When establishing the SEO plan for Faretti, we found out the English language version of the client’s website hadn’t been monitored by any analytics tools. It wasn’t the biggest obstacle, though.
As we learnt later, the English language version of the website used a tracking code assigned to the Google Analytics account monitoring the Polish language version of the website.
Once we fixed that, we separated the Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts, and matched each one to the corresponding language version of the website. This way we were able to collect the correct data from the Fareti multistore.
While the analytics tool were finally collecting the data, we moved to creating a list of keywords.
Since farettishoes.co.uk was a completely new website, it wasn’t optimized for any keywords. We had to find the right phrases, minding the international SEO keyword research principles. For that we used external tools, and looked into the main competitors of Faretti on the UK market.
This way we managed to define two main keywords that we later transformed into long-tails for more quality traffic.
Two initial keywords we defined:
The long-tail keywords we created:
Our tactic clearly worked out, as we managed to put the keywords – that had never been indexed before – up in the search engine results page. All of the long-tail keywords that we suggested made it to the TOP3.
Multistore facilitates managing a few online stores in one place. However, to make good use of the possibilities it offers, it must be configured correctly.
Despite having numerous benefits, setting up a multistore properly isn’t that easy. There are many things you need to keep in mind in order not to harm the website. For example, copying all the elements from the e-store and pasting them to its clone version designed for another country / language version won’t do the trick. Naturally, there are more issues of this nature that must be taken care of.
Among numerous elements of Faretti multistore that required some fixing, there was an issue with the URLs. Most of the URLs in the English language version of the website were in Polish. Here is how the URLs on farettishoes.co.uk used to look like:
We corrected the URLs for improved SEO.
Another issue concerned the units and measurements. Since Europe uses the metric system, using centimeters instead of inches for the English product description contributed neither to UX nor SEO. Shortly after converting the units, we noticed that keywords improved their ranks:
When the issue with multistore was handled, we could focus on optymizing product names and headings.
The product names weren’t very specific. Neither did they include keywords. The issue was definitely one of the major ones mostly because the product names were also used in H1, included in the page title. This led to three problems:
We corrected the product names by inserting more relevant keywords. This move had a profound effect on SEO; as shown in the screenshot taken from Google Search Console:
When it comes to the product images, their alt tags were generated automatically on the basis of the product names. After fixing that issue, the visibility of our client’s product images in Google Images has increased significantly:
Another technical SEO-related issue that required our scrupulous attention was the problem of broken links.
Our audit revealed that instead of 301 redirection, our client’s used 302 redirection. This had to be corrected because 302 redirection indicates a temporary location of a new page. This lowered the link equity, and therefore had a negative effect on search ranking.
We replaced 302 redirect to the correct 301 redirect:
Title tag and meta descriptions are two elements displayed in a search result. As one of our aims was to attract more users to the client’s store, we had to take care those two elements read well.
The main page title was basically just the name of the company. Since the page title is one of the most important website elements that affect SEO, it should definitely include keywords. It should also indicate the main topic the page covers.
Here is how the client’s website used to be displayed in SERP:
Here is how it was displayed after our team introduced the necessary corrections:
Once the title tag and meta description were corrected, we started rewriting category names.
At the time we started working on the website, the category names were just a number and a measurement unit, e.g. + 6 cm. This caused three major problems:
We handled all of those three issues, and this is what we achieved:
The search result before the changes:
The search result after the changes:
Here is how we fixed URLs. First, the before:
and after:
After coping with all these issues, we added redirections to take the visitors from old pages to their new versions.
Finally, after introducing all major changes to the website and improving technical SEO, we could generate a new sitemap and get it indexed.
This was yet another major issue that needed to be handled – the client’s website didn’t have a sitemap. We generated this critical element of on-page SEO and uploaded it to the Google Search Console. In this simple way we notified the crawlers that the client’s website was ready to be indexed and showed to the customers looking for elevation shoes in the UK.
One of the last things we intended to do was to earn Faretti brand more recognition on the UK market.
Even though brand recognition lies in the scope of the marketing team, we wanted Faretti to get the attention it deserves. For that reason we came up with the long-tail keywords for product names, keeping monitoring their performance and strength. The thing was that “faretti” can be found in Italian language, and it stands for “headlamps”, which posed quite a challenge.
Fortunately, we succeeded and our efforts were rewarded – the branded keyword phrase rank increased. At the time of writing this case study, Faretti is in 24th place in the search results, even though it was outside the index when we decided to boost its ranks.
From the very beginning, we were strengthening the domain ranks by building referral links. The backlinks were placed in online business catalogs, on Q&A sites, blogs and various industry-related websites.
Here is the link profile before we started the off-site process for Faretti:
And the same link profile after 6 months:
Performing international SEO for a new website is always challenging, as there is no data collected that would point to the areas that need improvement. Luckily, our SEO strategy appeared to be successful – the positive effects become visible pretty quickly.
RESULT 1 Steady growth in website visibility
RESULT 2 Growing increase in organic traffic. In January 2020, there were as much as 700 visits registered
