Gladskin by Micreos, One Letter That Tripled a German Market
Per-market keyword research and content localisation across the UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany. In German, the product category has two correct spellings with very different search volumes, and the site was built on the smaller one.
Challenge
Gladskin, a Dutch skincare e-commerce brand by Micreos, needed to grow organic traffic and revenue across four European markets: the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Germany was the market where the language itself was the problem. German writes the skin condition both ways, rosazea and rosacea, and both are correct. The site had been built on rosazea, at roughly 14,800 searches a month. The other spelling carried roughly 40,800.
Gladskin by Micreos was a DEA.Amsterdam account, not a Silkdrive one. We started the SEO engagement at Ematters, for years among the top-ranked agencies in the Dutch marketing press, and continued it at DEA.Amsterdam after the smaller accounts split from it. Both focused on paid media, social and email; the SEO was supplied white-label and ran independently from August 2016. They held the client relationship and took a margin. The strategy, the analysis and the findings described here are our own work, measured in the client's own analytics.
Approach
- International SEO strategy tailored to each of the four markets
- Market-specific keyword research and content localisation
- Moved the German category page from the rosazea spelling to rosacea, with a new URL, rewritten on-page content and a redirect from the old page
- Technical and on-page optimisation across all country domains, including language targeting and sitemaps
Results
"Both spellings are correct German, and one of them had nearly three times the search volume. Moving the page was the obvious call on paper. Then the ranking vanished for weeks, Search Console reported the position as unknown, and I had to keep telling a client to wait. The reasoning was right and it was still the most uncomfortable month of the engagement. It came back higher than it had ever been."
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