SEO Case Study: Localization Boosts Organic Traffic by 502%
Objectives
The project focused on optimizing a global web shop selling football equipment in 15 languages, with the specific goal of localizing the website for Turkish shoppers.
This involved localizing the landing page, category pages, and product details. Furthermore, I optimized meta titles and descriptions to cater to the Turkish market.
While the primary focus appears to be on localization, it is essential to also pay attention to the ‘search intent’ of the target audience in this case.
Target Market
The target location for this study was Turkey, and the language of focus was Turkish.
Metrics (Before the Localisation)
Metrics were tracked over a 6-month period before and after the localization implementation.
In the first 6 months of publishing the Turkish version of this web shop, shoppers encountered a machine translation of the global version. During this period, no significant increase in organic traffic and keyword count was observed, and the statistics reflected a stable number as follows.
Brief Overview of Localisation Process
The project spanned two months and began with a thorough analysis of search intent among the target audience by studying top organic competitors.
To refine the focus, search queries were clustered to eliminate irrelevant terms, with a specific emphasis on commercial and transactional keywords given the nature of the e-commerce site.
Localizing the website involved a step-by-step process, starting from meta titles and descriptions to headings and the page content. The meta tags were strategically crafted using call-to-action (CTA) keywords and numbers to capture user interest.
Special attention was given to highlighting the secure and safe shopping experience offered by the web shop, recognizing the importance of building trust among Turkish buyers for a newcomer in the market.
The implementation of keywords into headings and content was executed in a natural manner, avoiding keyword stuffing and duplicate terms.
Regular checks for keyword cannibalism were conducted after each category was localized to ensure optimal SEO performance.
Results and Conclusion
The results demonstrate a significant improvement in organic traffic and keyword rankings after the localization process.
The 502% increase in organic traffic within the latest month post-localization underscores the effectiveness of the strategy employed.
This success can be attributed to a meticulous approach that not only considered SEO best practices but also took into account the unique characteristics and preferences of the Turkish market.
The emphasis on trust-building elements and strategic use of keywords contributed to the outstanding performance observed in this SEO case study.
In addition to technical tasks such as hreflang and canonical tags, understanding search intent and optimizing content accordingly has a great impact on the success of technical SEO experts on multilingual sites.
