Case study: international SEO in food

01 · The starting point

Nine websites competing against each other

Three of the sites share French and two share Dutch. Without the tags that tell Google which country each site targets, the search engine can't decide which one to show, and same-language sites take positions away from each other.

The technical audit that opens the project puts the rest on the table: errors piled up over years of platform growth, with no one looking at the nine countries at once.

What the audit finds

Same-language sites cannibalizing each other on Google for lack of hreflang
4xx errors, duplicate titles, and pages with no H1
Recipes and posts more than five clicks from the homepage
Uncompressed images dragging down load speed
The recipe pages with no presence at all on Google

02 · The strategy

Three levers, the same ones in all nine countries

01 Audit and technical SEO on every site Nine audits to a single standard: speed, indexing, architecture, and errors, prioritized by impact and handed to the technical team as an action plan.

02 SEO content by market Keyword research by country and language, re-optimization of what already exists, and a shared editorial structure: the same categories, with subcategories tailored to each market's demand.

03 Link building and daily monitoring Monthly links to each country's strategic pages, and daily watch over traffic and indexing across the nine sites.

03 · The numbers

Organic, the top channel in eight of nine markets

More than 215,000 organic sessions in a year. And the recipe pages go from not existing for Google to the top position in every market after the link and metadata work.

24,638 keywords ranking across all the sites
2,978 of them on the first page of Google
In Spain, 196 keywords in the top 3

Organic sessions by market · one year of the project · client's Google Analytics

Search Console chart from one of the markets: organic clicks in the final stretch of the year double those of the year before — One of the nine markets: organic clicks against the previous year, real Search Console measurement

04 · What the reports don't show

The day all nine sites vanish from Google

A change on the platform, on the client's technical team's side, drops the nine sites out of Google's index overnight. No alarm goes off in any dashboard: the daily monitoring that's part of the service catches it.

We coordinate the fix with their team, traffic recovers within days, and the year closes with no noticeable loss. Soon after, that same watch spots a copy of the site that Google has started indexing as duplicate content, and it's pulled before it can do harm. SEO that isn't watched is lost in silence.

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Same client: from zero to 40,000 organic visits a month →

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