Ellery is a luxury womenswear label started in Australia.
The brand now operates out of Sydney, Europe and the USA and operates localised versions of the website in each market.
However this was causing major problems with Google unable to determine the correct site to show in each location.
Users in Australia were seeing the US version of the site when searching the brand, and similar issues were present in the other markets.
Ellery had attempted to resolve the problem internally and with other SEO consultants but not been able to resolve it.
Local Digital started with a crawl of the website as well as our experienced based assessment of the code.
We initially identified problems with the implementation of hreflang tags across the three sites. The tags reference the home page no matter what page the user was on.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we identified an automatic redirect was in place based on the user’s geography.
For example, if a user was in the USA it would redirect them to the US version of the site.
The problem is, Googlebot crawls from the US, so when it visited the Australian or European sites it was redirect to the US version.
To confirm our suscpicions, we used Search Console to fetch the site as Googlebot with a URL parameter in place forcing it to ignore the geo redirect.
This crawl immediately fetched the correct version of the site.
The problems impacting the Ellery site were purely technical and relatively simple to fix once identified.
Local Digital’s depth of SEO experience was called in to provide a solution where other SEO consultants had fallen short.
Our simple 3 step solution (listed below) fixed the problems imediately and ensure that the correct localised site showed for searchers in each location as per the screenshot to the right.
