Cobblefinch · Irish knitwear DTC brand · Galway
How a Galway knitwear label beat the tourist shops for 'Aran jumper' in three markets
+204%
organic revenue across Ireland, the US and Germany in 11 months
Retail & E-commerce · UK & Ireland · Commerce SEO plan
01 · The tangle
One skein, wound into 612 knots.
Cobblefinch sold to Ireland, the US and Germany from one untranslated store with variants as separate URLs, splitting authority across 600 near-duplicate pages.
The jumpers were the real thing — hand-finished in Galway, from Irish and merino wool — yet the tourist shops on Shop Street outranked them for the very phrase they were built around. Their competitors had one strong URL per style. Cobblefinch had eighteen weak ones, all in English, all priced in euro.
Audit · what the crawl found
- Dropped stitchF1 · Technical
612 variant URLs, no canonicals
Each colour and size had its own indexable URL (/aran-crew-oatmeal-m, /aran-crew-oatmeal-l…). Google picked a different one each crawl, so links and reviews were spread across up to 18 copies of the same jumper.
- Tangled skeinF2 · International
Three markets, one English store
US and German shoppers landed on euro prices and Irish sizing. No hreflang, no localised currency in the feed, so google.de ranked a tourist shop's German page above Cobblefinch for its own styles.
- Loose tensionF3 · Shopping feed
Feed titles missing the words people search
Titles read "The Inis Crew — Oatmeal". No 'Aran', no 'merino', no gender, no GTIN. 23% of items carried Merchant Center warnings and showed without ratings.
- Thin rowsF4 · Content
Collection pages with a heading and a grid
Category pages had 40 words of copy and no answer to what makes an Aran an Aran — stitch, wool weight, origin — so informational intent went to the tourist shops' blogs.
02 · The pattern
Four techniques, one continuous strand.
Built on our Commerce SEO plan: fix the structure first, then translate it, then make every listing worth clicking.
- 01
Product feeds
A rebuilt Merchant Center feed per market: search-led titles (style + stitch + fibre + fit), GTINs, local currency and sizes, and supplemental labels for seasonal gifting.
- 02
Collection page SEO
Collections organised by how people search — Aran, fisherman, cardigans, by fibre — each with 300–500 words on stitch, wool and care, plus a FAQ written from real query data.
- 03
Hreflang
Subfolders for en-IE, en-US and de-DE with reciprocal hreflang and an x-default, validated against the sitemap so each market sees its own prices and sizing.
- 04
Review schema
Variant reviews merged onto one parent product, marked up with Product, Offer and AggregateRating so stars appear in organic results and Shopping listings.
Keyword clusters · read as cables
Each cable crosses once per keyword in the cluster; its width is the cluster’s modelled monthly search volume across the three markets.
Aran jumper / sweater
7 kw · 48.2k/mo
avg #29 → #5
Fisherman sweater
5 kw · 21.4k/mo
avg #38 → #7
Merino cardigan
6 kw · 15.8k/mo
avg #24 → #6
Strickpullover Wolle
4 kw · 12.6k/mo
avg #61 → #9
Wool care & gifts
3 kw · 6.9k/mo
avg #18 → #3
03 · Row by row
11 months, written like a knitting pattern.
- Row 1Variant map: 612 colour/size URLs grouped under 41 parent styles.rev 101 · #34
- Row 2Canonicals and 301s live on the first 14 styles.rev 106 · #31
- Row 3Product feed rebuilt: GTINs, material, gender and colour attributes.rev 114 · #27
- Row 4en-IE, en-US and de-DE subfolders with reciprocal hreflang.rev 127 · #22
- Row 5German copy written by a native knitwear editor, not machine-translated.rev 145 · #17
- Row 6Collection pages rewritten around stitch, wool and fit.rev 166 · #13
- Row 7Review schema with aggregate ratings on every parent product.rev 191 · #10
- Row 8Care and stitch guides linked into the collections they serve.rev 219 · #8
- Row 9Seasonal feed labels and supplemental titles for gift searches.rev 248 · #7
- Row 10Internal links tightened from journal posts to collections.rev 277 · #6
- Row 11Bind off: every market indexed on one canonical per style.rev 304 · #5
04 · Pull the thread
Organic revenue: +204%
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Organic revenue index · baseline month = 100
Row 11 of 11
- Organic revenue
- +204%
- Duplicate URLs
- 0
- US 'Aran sweater'
- #5
- Shopping CTR
- +71%
Row 11. Bind off: every market indexed on one canonical per style.
Duplicate variant URLs
612 → 0
US 'Aran sweater' position
34 → 5
Shopping click-through
+71%
Rankings by market
| Keyword | Vol/mo | Before | Month 11 |
|---|---|---|---|
| aran sweater | 18,100 | #34 | #5 |
| irish fisherman sweater | 14,800 | #41 | #7 |
| cable knit sweater women | 9,900 | — | #11 |
| merino wool cardigan | 8,100 | #52 | #9 |
| authentic irish sweater | 2,400 | #27 | #4 |
— = not in the top 100. Volumes are modelled monthly searches in that market.
05 · The knot
Finished, labelled, ready to ship.
Every result, sewn into the seam. Same figures as the modelled scenario above — no washing out after a season, because the structure underneath them is fixed.
Cobblefinch · Galway
Organic search, 100% re-knit
- Organic revenue
- +204%
- Duplicate variant URLs
- 612 → 0
- US 'Aran sweater' position
- 34 → 5
- Shopping click-through
- +71%
Wash at 30°. Do not bleach. Dry flat. Reshape while damp. Made in Galway, Ireland. Modelled over 11 months.
Commerce SEO · Ecommerce SEO
Get a plan like this
Selling in more than one market from one store? We’ll untangle the variants, the feeds and the hreflang before writing a word of new copy.