This is the story of a popular design platform. In an effort to significantly increase organic traffic, decided to give International SEO a try and ended up doubling organic traffic within 12 months.

It all started in September 2022, when the platform started its first campaign with Webify; first only focusing on the English language.

They engaged Webify initially to help with a few specific items:

  • Technical improvements, mainly for template pages, including internal linking
  • Expansion of their Keyword targeting and topical mapping
  • Optimizing the content they were producing based on more robust requirements and a new focus on growth strategy.

Upon implementation of the initial scope of work from Webify, the site’s traffic improved from 419,000 to 597,000 visits per month – a 42% lift, mainly achieved by technical low-hanging fruits, but still nothing too exciting.

Then, a year later, in September 2023–Webify rolled out the initial phase of international implementation: The first 4 languages. Based on Webify’s proprietary international opportunity analysis, it was identified that the most advantageous languages to focus on were Spanish, Portuguese for Brazil, French, and German.

This internal process considers competition, traffic potential, and traffic value into account, per language. It is then presented in a comparison mode so that it’s easy to prioritize languages based on projected ROI.

From there, and entirely by the Pareto rule, we started creating the highest converting pages within each localized language set. This turned out to be the homepage, product, and main category/template pages, and last, the best-performing content with a mix of content that works best for every location.

When this process is done correctly, there should already be some existing search demand for the brand in every language – and as such, Google begins to rank the local versions pretty quickly. As a rule of thumb, typically within a few weeks.

Here’s how the results broke down for each of the initial 4 expansion languages:

German:

Portuguese:

French:

Overall, these 597,000 visits per month to which we were able to grow the platform with an SEO project focusing on the English site alone, doubled to 1.2M visits per month within just 10 months. The overall project was now yielding a total organic growth rate of almost 300% within 22 months.

The strategic addition of these languages, and the meticulous roll-out, paying close attention to the conversion potential of both the keywords and languages that we executed on, also drove a significant increase in conversions and revenue. Almost doubling the business in a tough couple of years for SEO.