Salewa

INTERNATIONAL SEO

Challenge:

Salewa was founded in 1935 in Munich, Germany. The Outdoor Brand is part of the OberAlp AG and provides clothing and supplies. The brand specializes in selling mountain sporting equipment, for activities such as hiking, skiing, ski touring or climbing. Salewa successfully focusses on developing lightweight products hoping to reach global expansion.

Before we were contacted in the year 2017, the expansion von the german-italian Brand failed. The aim at the time was to combine seven local internet domains into one international address. With the attempt Salewa lost 90% of the Organic Visibility and the Google Traffic.

Our Migration and international Growth Specialists managed to implement an advanced SEO System and were able to reach the recovery of visibility and traffic in just the first four months of the project. The organic traffic grew by 59% in between the first three years after the start of our joined project. In only two and a half years our team could succeed by having the ROAs of the Search Engine Advertisement (SEA) grow from -0.80 € to +11.23€.

Salewa, a global leader in alpine products, operates in over 30 countries and supplies more than 2,500 stores worldwide. In 2017, their in-house IT team encountered a major issue during a domain migration, resulting in a significant loss of organic visibility and traffic. Our team was brought in to resolve the issue urgently.

Solution:

We developed an agile SEO recovery strategy, focusing on the following key areas:

1. Redirects: All pages had been mistakenly redirected to the homepage. We conducted a comprehensive domain mapping and redirected all URLs to their proper counterparts. Additionally, we resolved all 404 error pages.

2. Technical SEO: To expedite reindexing by Google, we implemented both XML and HTML redirect sitemaps, improving the overall technical health of the site.

3.SEO Assets: Meanwhile, our content team performed thorough keyword research across all target languages. We then developed and deployed SEO assets to stimulate traffic recovery and future growth.

Scope:

Regions: DACH, Italy, France, US, Spain
Languages: 5 languages
Countries: 7

Salewa’s in-house digital marketing and IT teams initiated the migration from six local country domains (.de, .it, .fr, .at, .ch, .es) to a single global top-level domain (.com).

Results

A domain migration was performed without taking into account any SEO migration best-practices and as a result the organic visibility dropped by -99% in all target markets. Almost 40% of all old URLs were simply redirected to the Homepage or not redirected at all, almost 10.000 URLs returning 404 Error Pages.

As a result, Page Authority on homepages (and all other important pages) went from 52 to 1 points, best performing pages lost all their rankings, traffic and subsequently organic sales. It was a business critical situation.

Our SEO team has performed a “failed migration recovery strategy” and within 3 months most of the countries recovered organic visibility.

In the three following years, annual organic sessions grew from 1.1m to 1.7m (+59%), organic visibility by +131% and organic rankings by +582% since the full migration recovery.