{"id":11435,"date":"2020-06-28T15:40:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-28T13:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weventure.de\/?post_type=projekte&p=11435"},"modified":"2022-06-29T14:37:04","modified_gmt":"2022-06-29T12:37:04","slug":"breitling-international-seo","status":"publish","type":"projekte","link":"https:\/\/weventure.de\/en\/all-projects\/case-studies\/breitling-international-seo","title":{"rendered":"International SEO – as reliable as Swiss clockwork"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Breitling<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n


International companies have to think and act bigger. When they take their offline business online, a thorough international search engine optimization becomes all the more important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Also Breitling, one of the best-known brands in the watch industry, is aiming to sell more luxury products online. Together with WEVENTURE, special measures have been designed and adopted to make sure that the correct country versions of the page searched for are displayed in the SERPs for each market requested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Breitling<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n\n Our Mission<\/span>\n \n
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Challenges of international <\/u>e-commerce <\/h2> <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n

Serving different markets also means the challenge of taking into account different currencies and very different shipping and logistics conditions.\u200b
Most importantly, a user in the USA should only come to see products that are available on the American market. But this is exactly where online marketers face very big challenges. For example, in many countries in the world, people speak English. As a result, search queries do not vary or vary only to a small extent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Same search term = Same result?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

If a potential customer in the US wants to buy a Breitling, they might search for \u201cbuy Breitling watch\u201d. If a potential customer in the UK wants to buy a Breitling, they might also search for \u201cbuy Breitling watch\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An analogous scenario might of course apply to users from Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for Breitling, it is important to know that not all countries were released for online sales and shipping at the same time. While a purchase in the US was already possible, e-commerce for the UK was set to be rolled out only 6 months later. It was therefore highly important that any potential customer from the US would land on a product page that displays prices in dollars and offers the possibility to buy<\/em> watches. The UK user, on the other hand, should get directed to a product page with prices in pounds and a pre-order function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The correct country allocation is also important when it comes to shipping options. In order to guarantee shorter delivery times and safer routes, the products are only sent within the country or within a defined group of countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talking about international SEO, the hreflang tag<\/a> constitutes an extremely important factor. But what can you do if the hreflang tag is correctly implemented, but the wrong country versions of the website still end up in the search results?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Challenges at Breitling<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

1. Former URL changes and backlink impact<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before starting with any e-commerce activity, the URL structure had to be adjusted with a view to best-practice international SEO. It was decided to use only one domain (Breitling.com) and to define the country and language in the first directory of the URL. Before the changeover, only the language was displayed in the directory and then forwarded depending on the IP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the decision was made at that time to forward any English-language page from Breitling.com\/en\/ to the American version Breitling.com\/us-en\/, the US page was significantly boosted. All backlinks from external websites (whether from British or American ones) were redirected to the American site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result: The US page had become more important to Google than its British equivalent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big advantage of using only one main domain (.com \/) lies in the fact that the individual SEO strengths of your various country versions are concentrated on one domain. When opting for country-specific domains (e.g. weventure.de<\/a>), by contrast, you must be aware that in an international strategy, each domain (.de, .ch or .uk) will have to fight for SEO strength and visibility on its own.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, the question was how to strengthen the various language-country combinations in a well-balanced manner so that the correct version would be displayed in the correct region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Crawl budget: Various language combinations<\/strong><\/strong> for each country <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, the decision was made to start e-commerce activities in around 130 countries with various language combinations. For the Swiss website alone, this meant a total of five language variations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n