!Before you begin
Fourteen kits, no instructions.
Fourteen country sites competed against each other, hreflang was broken on 70% of pages and the product feed was rejected for missing GTINs in six markets.
Every market had been launched as its own storefront by a different team. The catalogue was the same 9,400 products, but each country had its own categories, its own filters and its own feed. Google saw fourteen half-built cabinets competing for the same space, and regularly showed Swedish shoppers the Danish one.
- 1. lindqvar.dk › produkter › sofabord-eg-1123Sofabord i egetræ | Lindqvar1.095 DKK
- 2. lindqvar.com › en › coffee-table-oakOak coffee table – Lindqvar Home
- 1. lindqvar.se › vardagsrum › soffbord › ekSoffbord i ek – massivt trä | Lindqvar Home1 495 kr · I lager · Fri frakt
- 2. competitor.se › soffbordSoffbord ek – stort urval
Illustrative results for one query in Sweden, month 0 and month 14.
Audit · check all parts before assembly
- A1 · Hreflang
71% of 182,000 URLs had broken hreflang: missing return tags, targets that redirected, and en-UK instead of en-GB.
Generate clusters from one catalogue ID
- A2 · Cannibalisation
The .com, .co.uk and .ie stores served identical English copy; Google swapped them in and out of the same results.
Distinct pricing, delivery and copy per market
- A3 · Product feed
Feeds in 6 markets were rejected: 36% of items used supplier codes in place of GTINs.
EAN-13 from the PIM, validated nightly
- A4 · Crawl budget
81% of Googlebot requests hit filter URLs; 2.3M crawlable facet combinations against 9,400 products.
Index only facets with demand
- A5 · Architecture
Categories up to 5 levels deep, with sofa tables and coffee tables split differently in every market.
One 3-level taxonomy, localised names
- A6 · Structured data
Product schema showed SEK prices on the German store; no breadcrumbs anywhere.
Offer per currency, BreadcrumbList
1–5Assembly
Five steps, one catalogue.
Built on our Commerce SEO plan. The order matters: the frame (taxonomy) comes first, then the dividers that keep markets apart (hreflang, faceted navigation, product feeds, schema markup). Step through it below; each new part clicks into place in blue.
Step 1 · Category architecture
Build the frame
One shared taxonomy for all 14 storefronts: 5 levels collapsed to 3, 1,140 categories merged to 386 canonical ones, each mapped to the query people actually type in that language ("soffbord", "sofabord", "Couchtisch").
Parts in this step
- 386×CAT-01canonical category nodes
- 3×LVL-03levels: room › type › material
- 754×301-MAPredirects from merged categories
- Product feeds
- Hreflang
- Faceted navigation
- Category architecture
- Schema markup
14Assembly schedule
14 months, month by month.
- 01·
Crawl all 14 storefronts; 182k URLs inventoried
Survey and handover - 021
Taxonomy workshop; 1,140 categories mapped to 386
Step 1: Category architecture - 031
Redirect map live in the Nordic stores
Step 1: Category architecture - 042
Hreflang sitemaps generated from catalogue IDs
Step 2: Hreflang - 052
x-default chooser; en-GB fix; errors under 20%
Step 2: Hreflang - 063
Facet rules: 212 pages indexable, the rest closed
Step 3: Faceted navigation - 074
GTINs recovered; six rejected feeds resubmitted
Step 4: Product feeds - 084
14 market feeds with local titles and currency
Step 4: Product feeds - 095
Product, Offer and BreadcrumbList templates
Step 5: Schema markup - 101
Remaining 7 markets migrated to the new taxonomy
Step 1: Category architecture - 113
Second wave: 64 material facets promoted
Step 3: Faceted navigation - 125
ItemList on categories; zero Rich Results errors
Step 5: Schema markup - 134
Seasonal feed rules for outdoor furniture
Step 4: Product feeds - 14·
Handover: monitoring, alerts and playbook
Survey and handover
✓Finished product
One cabinet, fourteen markets that stopped competing.
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Organic revenue (modelled)
+€4.1M
Hreflang errors
71% → 2%
beforeafter
Feed approval rate
64% → 98%
beforeafter
Top-3 category terms
+312
One square per category term that reached positions 1–3 across all markets.
Category rankings, sample
| Term | Mkt | Vol/mo | Month 0 | Month 14 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| soffbord ek | SE | 9,900 | 14 | 2 |
| sofabord eik | NO | 6,600 | 23 | 1 |
| Couchtisch Eiche massiv | DE | 22,200 | 41 | 3 |
| bokhylla vit | SE | 8,100 | 9 | 1 |
| oak sideboard | UK | 14,800 | 37 | 3 |
| boekenkast hout | NL | 5,400 | — | 2 |
| table basse chêne | FR | 18,100 | 52 | 3 |
| kirjahylly | FI | 4,400 | 18 | 2 |
Open a compartment
Compartment
Finland
+22 category terms in the top 3
Your kit · Commerce SEO
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