EzyDog EU: Fixing a Broken Hreflang Setup and Doubling Organic Growth

Industry: Ecommerce (pet products)
Market: European Union
Scope: Technical SEO and localisation
Languages: English (main EU site), German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian
My role: SEO Specialist

Results at a glance

• Site health rose from a low of 32% to 98%, and it has held at 98%
• Organic clicks roughly doubled in six months, from about 75 a day in early February to 160-200 a day by July
• 23.2K clicks and 1.17M impressions between 1 February and 31 July 2026
• 2% average CTR and average position of 12
• Localised collection pages became the top performers, led by Germany, then France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands

The challenge

The EU site’s health score had fallen to as low as 32%. The site served six language versions, and something in the international setup was clearly broken, but the cause wasn’t obvious.

The diagnosis

In my audit, I traced the problem to multiple conflicting hreflang setups running at the same time. Search engines were getting contradictory signals about which language and regional version belonged to which audience, which undermined indexing and the site’s overall health. I found the root cause and resolved it.

The approach

1. Audit and fix: Identified the duplicate hreflang implementations and consolidated them into a single, correct setup.
2. Localise the collection pages: With the foundation stable, I localised the collection pages into local-language versions for German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian. English stayed as the main EU version.

The outcome

The fix took site health from 32% to 98%, and it has stayed there. With the foundation stable and the localised collection pages live, organic performance climbed. Over six months, daily clicks roughly doubled, with the strongest stretch in late June and July, when daily clicks repeatedly peaked above 200. The localised collection pages became the site’s best-performing pages, in this order: German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Across the window, the site earned 23.2K clicks from 1.17M impressions.

Takeaway

International SEO growth depends on the foundation. Localised content can’t perform until search engines can tell which version belongs to which audience. Fixing hreflang first gave localisation something solid to build on, and the local collection pages then drove the growth.