Breitling SA

Setting Global SEO Benchmarks with a Headless CMS

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Clicks in Germany

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Clicks in Canada

Country–Language combinations

About Breitling

Breitling SA is a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer that has stood for precision and pioneering spirit in chronometry since 1884. With a strong connection to aviation and a global market presence in 132 countries, Breitling is now a leading direct-to-consumer brand in the luxury segment. To meet the complexity of 11 languages and hundreds of market variants, the company decided to pursue a radical technological modernization.

Step 1

The Challenge

Before migrating to a headless CMS, Breitling was operating within a digital ecosystem that had grown over many years and was no longer able to meet the modern requirements of a global luxury brand. Although we had already achieved significant successes since the start of our partnership in 2019—such as increasing correct country targeting across more than 130 markets to 95%—both Breitling and we as an agency were increasingly reaching the limits of what was technically feasible. The decision for a radical system change was driven by major operational bottlenecks and technical shortcomings that were increasingly restricting competitiveness in e-commerce.

Dependency

The legacy CMS in use was a rigid, custom-built system where even the smallest text changes or image updates required an IT ticket. This severely slowed down the marketing and content teams and prevented quick responses to market trends.

200 Country–Language Combinations

Managing 130 countries and 11 languages had become barely manageable in the old system. Different currencies, shipping conditions, and local pricing per market resulted in enormous manual maintenance effort.

Crawl Budget Overload

New collections and watch models were often indexed by Google days later than competitors. This delay led to direct revenue losses with every product launch, as organic visibility was missing during the critical initial phase.

Page Speed

The outdated architecture caused ongoing load time issues. In a mobile-first world, this technical bottleneck resulted in a poorer user experience and put conversion rates at risk.

Internationalization

Despite local directories, teasers and content were often only available in English—even on German or French language versions. This weakened local relevance and led to user frustration.

Omnichannel

The monolithic structure of the old system was designed exclusively for the website. Future plans for mobile apps or digital point-of-sale (POS) integrations could not be implemented technologically with the existing legacy software.

URL Structures

Over the years, faulty redirects (e.g., from global pages to US-specific versions) caused users to frequently land on incorrect country variants. A comprehensive cleanup of the URL logic was urgently required.

Step 2

Our Measures

Breitling’s decision to switch to a modern headless architecture with Contentful marked the beginning of a fundamental SEO re-conceptualization. This transition was strategically necessary for future omnichannel plans, but it also introduced an entirely new level of complexity: because the new system operates without a fixed frontend, features that are taken for granted in traditional systems—such as metadata fields, sitemaps, or an integrated live preview—were suddenly no longer standard. Our task was to harness this technological freedom and ensure that the new structures would not jeopardize organic visibility, but instead elevate it to a whole new level.

Infrastructure

In this first focus area, we built the technical foundation for the new system, as headless platforms like Contentful do not provide many SEO features out of the box.

Definition of a technical rule set: In a comprehensive Confluence document, we redefined all standards for indexation, hreflang tags, canonicals, and URL logic.
Development of a custom SEO module: Since Contentful does not offer native SEO fields, we commissioned the development of a module for metadata (title/description), no-index controls, canonicals, and Open Graph data.
Implementation of server-side rendering (SSR): To ensure that search engines and AI bots can reliably process JavaScript-heavy content, SSR was established as a key technology.
Automation of structured data: We configured the automatic generation of schema markup (e.g., for products and boutiques), with variables pulled directly from the system.
Redesign of sitemap logic: We defined strict rules for sitemap creation, size, and nesting depth to ensure that only relevant, indexable pages are crawled.

Mapping & Content Migration

The second part of our efforts focused on safeguarding the migration from an organizational perspective and cleanly transferring content into the new structure.

Comprehensive URL cleanup: We analyzed and cleaned up the entire historical URL structure to remove outdated directories and strengthen the geographic relevance of core markets.
Strategic content modeling: Together with the IT teams, we defined content types and data models that now give editors maximum flexibility in global content management.
Manual content migration: Because an automated export from the legacy system was not possible, we supported the manual migration of all editorial content across hundreds of market variants.
Phased rollout strategy: We planned the migration in stages—starting with pilot markets such as the US and Canada and ending with the final launch in Japan—so we could identify and learn from technical issues early on.
Quality assurance (QA) & monitoring: Through intensive testing in staging environments and close monitoring after go-live, we were able to identify and resolve technical issues such as incorrect hreflang tags.

We Create Digital Leaders

Step 3

WEVENTURE delivers Results

Although the technological transition initially led to significant declines in the first pilot markets, targeted optimizations and issue resolution enabled the metrics to recover very quickly overall. In core markets, performance surpassed pre-relaunch levels within a short period of time (as of May 2025).

Click Growth in Germany

Just two and a half months after the relaunch, clicks in the German market (/de-de/) increased from 24.7k (September 2024) to 47.5k (January 2025). This represents nearly a doubling of organic performance—an increase that cannot be explained by seasonality alone.

Successful Turnaround in the United States

The United States launched as the pilot market for the headless migration on August 20, 2024. Technical issues such as infinite pagination, missing SSR, and faulty internal linking initially caused a severe traffic loss of 45%. Through an intensive stabilization phase, these issues were resolved, allowing performance to return to pre-relaunch levels by November 15, 2024. Since then, metrics have stabilized at 5–10% above previous levels, demonstrating the future-proof nature of the architecture.

Growth in Canada

While other pilot markets stagnated, the Canadian market recorded a click increase of 25% above previous levels as early as October 10, 2024—less than two months after launch.

Future-Proof Infrastructure

Thanks to the successful implementation of server-side rendering (SSR), global content is now optimally readable for search engines and AI bots, while page speed has been sustainably improved.

Additional Achievements

Learnings

Key Insights

Headless is not a standard SEO product: Unlike monolithic systems such as WordPress, headless platforms lack essential SEO features out of the box. Functions like metadata fields, no-index controls, or canonical logic must be custom-built and integrated into the CMS interface as a dedicated SEO module.
Complete reset of technical SEO rules: When switching architectures, all existing indexation and sitemap rules become invalid. It is essential to fully redefine technical standards for sitemaps (size, nesting depth), URL structures, and structured data in a comprehensive technical rule set (e.g., documented in Confluence).
Risk management through rollout strategy: The most economically important market (such as the US for Breitling) should not be the first pilot market. Technical issues like incorrect hreflang tags can cause traffic losses of up to 45% in the early stages; learning phases should therefore take place in less critical regions.
SSR as a business-critical factor: Because headless systems are extremely JavaScript-heavy, server-side rendering (SSR) is indispensable. Only SSR ensures that search engine crawlers and modern AI bots can reliably and efficiently process content without running into JavaScript barriers.
Complexity of content modeling: The core of any headless migration is content modeling. SEO requirements must be incorporated as early as the planning phase to define how different content types (e.g., landing pages vs. product detail pages) are indexed and which teams (e.g., global vs. local editors) have access to specific fields.
Doubling of QA effort: Quality assurance must be planned far more extensively than with classic relaunches. A staging environment that mirrors the live environment exactly is mandatory in order to catch JavaScript-specific issues such as infinite pagination or faulty internal linking before go-live.
The human factor and team scalability: A headless project should never be handled by a single developer (single-point-of-failure risk). It requires a specialized team proficient in modern tech stacks, as well as early involvement of all stakeholders (copywriters, SEOs, IT) to ensure long-term independence of marketing workflows.
Sustainability vs. hype: A headless CMS only makes sense at a high level of complexity (e.g., 200+ country–language combinations) or when multi-channel delivery is planned (apps, POS systems). For simple, content-driven websites without sufficient IT budget, the technological complexity is often not economically viable.