The site had over 2,000 pages and phased out SEO implementations of more directories after the migration from a monolingual to a dual-lingual website. Below is a very broad overview what was done and in which order, plus considerations and lessons learnt. The idea is to show understanding of the complexities of SEO project managing content and technical issues. This case study looks at not the complete mirror image of content, but the main high impact products for two dominant languages in Switzerland – German and French.
The Swiss German language product offerings were being translated to the Swiss French speaking Market. There are distinct differences in buyer profile and in some cases, some products for one language could not be offered to the other for cultural / educational reasons.
It was imperative that I considered both technical, keyword volume and demand concerns as well as user experience when adapting a product that was viable in one language to another.
Preparation Phase:
I focused on products with high volume and conversion potential, while letting go of some less relevant or low conversion/interest products.
Using ScreamingFrog, the current site’s navigation and internal link flow were mapped to an Excel / Google Docs sheet that was the master template for keyword combinations and to ensure no pages were left out.
I conducted a complete audit of the existing website architecture, content, and internal and backlink profile.
Content Analysis Stage & Future Traffic Growth Projections:
Performing extensive keyword research relevant to business offerings and industry trends for existing French and German keywords and establishing a plan for the new structure, reliance, and interlinking of these keywords. Analyzing historical performance of individual pages (particularly high conversion rates and dwell times) using Google Analytics and search console analytics.
Evaluating incoming referral traffic patterns and prioritized important referring domains and issues of past redirect chains.
I then classified content types (blog posts vs product descriptions vs category pages) and determine whether there should be modifications or additions, before or after roll-out.
New Architecture Development Was Implemented Between Languages
Prior to optimisation for usability, a strategic information architecture was aligned with identified keywords. As a result of the limited time and budget, using the existing architecture was able to generate keyword combinations using directory names, as well as integrate website ‘uniformity’ for secondary and tertiary keywords that would be used for SEO and schemas in the future.
A high impact hierarchy was planned by considering best practices for recategorizing products/services for another native language but a different buyer profile.
Later, the creation of an editorial calendar of blog articles, FAQ sections etc to increase internal linking across directories – allowing for more extensive crawls and zero orphan pages.
Finally, breadcrumb navigation structures were applied for both languages, including introduction of various sub-directories in the site structure for middle of the funnel ‘FAQS’.
There is no need for canonical norms when mapping present to future linguistic differences that have different buyer profiles (in the short term)
A cut off date was set and no updated products were added to the existing website. The business risk associated with adding new information to the website had to be considered.
A map of all live URLs against proposed destination paths following established naming conventions was created in full – following defined SEO keyword combinations.
I decided how non-canonical versions of pages handle requests — e.g., www versus no subdomain prefixes. A decision was made to redirect all https:// using 301 to https://www.
Controversially, no Canonicals were considered as many of the newly planned French language pages on the website did not mirror the German content. They had radically different buyer profiles. Thus there were no duplicate issues.
(Lesson Learned: Hreflang should really be considered at this point with the geographical closeness to France, and the use of Swiss French as a language. Given that the rewards outweighed the risks of attracting French traffic it was dropped at this stage).
Redirect Rules Configuration:
Proper response codes indicating permanence (301) were used over temporary moves (302) that caused issues with previous directory changes were avoided.
Technical Execution Process:
IT development applied and configured redirect logic directly inside the hosting environment files (.htaccess) which made life easier with redirects. In the end there were negligible issues with 404 errors, typically caused with accents in URLs and manual typos.
Post-Deployment Monitoring:
Tracking and setting up essential KPI measurements went smoothly. The process flow for entering into the conversionsand conversion page template funnel was the same per language.
Error logs in Search Console were checked and the majority of errors were with typos.
Given the size of the project and few errors, it was an outstanding success.