Telegrama · Puerto NatalesNo. 010
+117%
English-market organic +117% stop orphans 1,400 to 0 stop hreflang errors 2,300 to 0 stop enquiries +68% stop
— Summit camp, month 10
Field dispatches · SEO case study
Ventisquero Expeditions
Patagonia expedition operator · Puerto Natales · Puerto Natales, Chile
How a Patagonia expedition company rebuilt its site without losing its English-speaking market
Ten months, ten dispatches from the field: how a three-language expedition site was moved, rewired and re-signalled without losing the travellers who find it from the US, the UK and Germany.
- Plan
- Signal · Technical SEO
- Duration
- 10 months
- Industry
- Travel & Leisure
Dispatch 00 · Conditions on arrival
The old site was a crevasse field.
An outdated three-language site with mixed HTTP/HTTPS, broken hreflang and 1,400 orphaned pages was dragging down rankings in the US, UK and Germany.
Ventisquero sells guided treks and ice expeditions out of Puerto Natales, and roughly seven in ten bookings come from English and German speakers planning a year ahead. A redesign was overdue, but a careless move would have cut the routes those travellers use to find the company, right before the austral summer.
Audit · six findings logged at base camp
- F-01 · Protocol2 × 6,812
Two live versions of every page
HTTP and HTTPS both returned 200. 312 internal links and 41 canonicals still pointed at http://, splitting signals between duplicates.
- F-02 · Hreflang2,300
2,300 broken language annotations
Missing return tags, a single generic 'en' code serving both US and UK, no x-default, and 640 annotations pointing at redirected URLs.
- F-03 · Architecture1,400
1,400 orphaned pages
Dated departure pages from past seasons, reachable only through old sitemaps. They soaked up crawl budget and competed with evergreen route pages.
- F-04 · Structured data0 / 212
No trip, offer or FAQ markup
212 expeditions with prices and departure dates, none described as TouristTrip or Offer. Competitors held the FAQ and price rich results.
- F-05 · Core Web VitalsLCP 5.8 s
A hero video on a satellite connection
Mobile LCP 5.8 s from an autoplay hero video, CLS 0.31 from a late-loading booking widget, INP 410 ms from a third-party chat bundle.
- F-06 · Content38 pages
Machine-translated German pages
German route pages were thin translations with English titles left in place, so Google folded them into the English cluster.
The route plan
Four ropes, fixed in order.
Built on our Signal plan for technical SEO. Migration first, because nothing else holds until every old URL has a single destination; then the language routes, the signals and finally the weight in the pack.
- 1
Site migration
A one-to-one redirect map for all 6,812 legacy URLs, single-hop 301s to an HTTPS-only build, staged behind authentication and launched with per-locale sitemaps and 72 hours of log monitoring.
- 2
Hreflang
Rebuilt in XML sitemaps rather than page heads: separate en-US and en-GB clusters, de and es, reciprocal return tags and an x-default pointing at the language chooser.
- 3
Structured data
TouristTrip, Offer, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList on every expedition in every language, generated from the booking system so prices and departures never drift.
- 4
Core Web Vitals
Poster frame instead of autoplay video, AVIF images, reserved space for the booking widget and the chat bundle deferred until interaction.
Ticker tape · 10 months
The dispatches, as they came in.
Choose a month on the tape, or use the arrow keys. Each slip is tapped out in Morse before the report appears.
Dispatch 01 / 10 · Base camp · Puerto Natales
Alt. 12 m
CRAWL
SURVEY OF THE OLD TERRAIN STOP
Full crawl of three language folders complete. 6,812 URLs found, two live protocols, 1,400 pages no internal link reaches. Baseline frozen before anything moves.
- 6,812 URLs crawled
- 2,300 hreflang errors logged
- CWV field data baselined
Summit report
English-market organic +117%, and the old crevasses closed for good.
+117%
English-market organic sessions
1,400 → 0
Orphaned pages
2,300 → 0
Hreflang errors
+68%
Expedition enquiries
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
BeforeMonth 10
BeforeMonth 10
Before migration50 / month
Month 1084 / month
Modelled enquiries per month across all markets; the migration dip recovers by month 3.
| Keyword | Market | Before | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| puerto natales expedition company | US | 9 | 1 |
| torres del paine w trek guided | US | 14 | 3 |
| grey glacier ice hike | US | 18 | 2 |
| patagonia expedition holidays | UK | 22 | 4 |
| torres del paine o circuit tour | UK | 27 | 5 |
| patagonia trekking small group | UK | 33 | 6 |
| patagonien trekking reise | DE | 31 | 6 |
| patagonien gletscher wanderung | DE | — | 9 |
— = not in the top 100. Modelled positions.
Get a plan like this
Moving a multilingual site, or already lost ground after one? Signal maps every URL and language route before anything moves.