SEO Case Study: Multi-Country Enterprise Retail and Services Group

What was the challenge?

A group running six country sites and two languages had five agencies and no shared standards. Hreflang was broken across markets, faceted URLs burned crawl budget, and SEO tickets sat for months behind product work. Revenue from brand search hid how weak non-brand visibility really was.

What was the strategy?

1. 01

   Set one technical standard and one owner across countries

2. 02

   Fix the crawl and hreflang problems at template level

3. 03

   Put SEO requirements into the product release process

What exactly was done?

3 moves, each with what was done and why it mattered.

1. 01Technical SEO

   Audited logs across all six sites

   Analysed server logs and crawl data, then blocked or consolidated 287K low-value URLs and rebuilt hreflang as one central mapping.

   Why it mattered: At this scale, a single template decision affects millions of crawls. Fixing root causes moved more traffic than any number of new articles.

2. 02Governance

   Added SEO to the release process

   Wrote acceptance criteria for development tickets, added automated checks to staging, and held a fortnightly review with product and engineering.

   Why it mattered: Enterprise SEO usually fails in the backlog. Getting into the sprint process cut average fix time from months to weeks.

3. 03Reporting

   Reported non-brand performance to the board

   Separated brand from non-brand, and reported revenue by country and category through a shared Looker Studio dashboard.

   Why it mattered: Leadership could finally see where search was growing, which ended arguments between country teams about priorities.

What do I stand for?

• Fix templates, not pages

  One template change can do the work of a thousand page edits.

• SEO belongs in the sprint

  If it is not in the release process, it does not ship.