SEO Case Study: International SEO Setup Leads to Higher Conversion

About

Elo are the inventors of touchscreen technology, with 25+ million displays installed in over 80 countries worldwide. They have 8 global websites offering a broad selection of interactive products and software solutions to companies across different industries.

Challenge

With the help of scandiweb’s SEO team, Elo wanted to increase organic traffic coming to their EMEA websites—elotouch.co.uk, elotouch.fr, and elotouch.de. From the get-go, we noticed that their main website has several typical technical SEO issues you can find on Magento, as well as confirmed that Elo’s EMEA websites were not getting all of the potential traffic, which meant lost conversions.

Approach

Technical SEO improvements

In the first wave of fixes, we focused on technical SEO. After the tech audit, we proceeded with multiple technical SEO improvements:

• Canonical tags implementation
• Internal linking fixes
• Standardized URL structure creation
• XML sitemap proper setup

Technical SEO fixes by themselves don’t result in high rankings in Google SERPs. However, they help to ensure that nothing holds the website back from ranking as high as possible with the existing content and backlinks portfolio.

International SEO setup

When working on Elo’s EMEA websites, we had to implement international SEO best practices, in addition to internal linking fixes.

While Google can identify different languages and display the right language results based on the search query, it’s still not perfect. In the case of elotouch.com and elotouch.co.uk, both domain names are not connected. Given that the domain name elotouch.com has more authority, it appears more often than the localized elotouch.co.uk, even in Google UK. However, from a user experience perspective, it’s better for users from the UK to land on elotouch.co.uk directly. The same goes for other Elo’s EMEA websites.

Watch Lesson 3 of our SEO Crash Course for more in-depth explanation of hreflang tags and international SEO.

To ensure that Google and other search engines have a clear understanding of which page to display based on language or location, a hreflang tag is used. It’s a tag that is incorporated into the website’s code and links to all localized country versions of a certain page. This way, Google can display the most suitable result on search engine result pages. Hreflang only affects organic traffic. 

Hreflang tag implementation for Elo

• Hreflang is enabled for all websites located under Magento 2 setup
• elotouch.com is marked as X-default—if there is no website matching the user’s Geolocation, Google should display elotouch.com as the primary option
• Implementation is performed using the Mageworx SEO extension
• QA of the implementation on staging and on the live site by the SEO team

How hreflang tags affect KPIs

The SEO team analyzed visits from the UK to elotouch.com in the previous months and concluded that redirecting this traffic to the correct website would 4 times increase the number of clicks elotouch.co.uk is receiving at the moment. 

Implementation of hreflang tag doesn’t affect all clicks, as there can still be cases when Google displays elotouch.com instead of elotouch.co.uk, etc. Overall, the expected result is a slight decrease in clicks for elotouch.com and an increase in clicks for local websites.

Results

We saw an increase in rankings and clicks by 6.2% compared to the previous period after the implementation of a standardized URL structure. We also observed higher conversion via contact form submissions due to correct traffic distribution on country-specific websites.

EMEA website clicks after implementing hreflang tag

• +33.25% Germany
• +46.34% UK
• +10.29% France

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