The mission

Our mission was to perform a comprehensive audit to identify the reason why the global traffic to the website had dropped off a cliff, sitting at a 3 year low.

Our SEO team enlisted the help of our website development experts to help with the challenging technical aspects of the complex website architecture.

The findings

The website had many 1000’s of hreflang tags errors, many of which we considered very serious. These errors included tags with missing confirmation links, missing x-default tags, non-canonical confirmation links and dozens of the hreflang tags were not using canonicals. All highly technical issues which needed resolving immediately.

Additionally we found the website had IP serving 301 redirects by default sending users to random languages. This technical glitch had affected the indexation of many pages.

To add to the issue list, many of the hreflang tags pointed to orphan pages – not a great signal for Google.

As a consecuence of all the above hreflang issues, the website had indexation issues for most of the languages, but especially so in Germany – which had seen the largest drop in traffic.

The challenge in this case was to fix all the hreflang issues for Google to better understand how the multilingual website is structured and index all the relevant pages.

The strategy

We delivered a very detailed report which pointed out all the correct hreflang tags for all the languages.

The strategy also included the creation of language-specific sitemaps and it’s submission via their correspondent Google Search Console accounts.

The result

As a result of the strategic work completed by our team of in-house SEO experts in London, over the next few months the Vetrotrech website development team began to action the recommendations from our report and, slowly but surely, the rankings began to recover and the global traffic began to return to the website.

9 months on and the traffic levels have begun to increase – much to the delight of the client and our SEO team.

The number of indexed pages increased 500% as well as making huge improvements to the engagement and rankings.

They also removed all the auto IP-serving redirects and now give users the choice to select the language, which benefits the user experience and engagement.

Next steps

The client was so happy with the work we completed, they booked for the senior marketing team to visit our London offices for an intensive SEO training course delivered by our SEO Director.

Additionally, we have now been asked to regularly support them with their global paid advertising campaigns across Google Ads and a selection of Social Media platforms.