increase in UK visibility
increase in DE visibility
new Featured Snippets attained
About the Wilkinson International SEO Migration case study
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About the client and the brief
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What we delivered
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The results
Wilkinson Sword invented the stainless steel blade in the 1950s, and is the world-renowned brand for razor systems, disposable razors and other personal products.
Wilkinson Sword approached us in 2019 to help launch new direct-to-consumer sites in the UK, Germany and France, and bring them all under one roof. This required migrating four websites (two in the UK) to the new master domain.
Alongside the migrations, they also wanted to set the sites up for future organic growth and ranking success. The existing sites had minimal non-brand visibility and were not ranking in position #1 for the majority of branded terms, unlike many of their suppliers (Boots, Superdrug, Tesco, Amazon etc.).
To implement the multiple migrations, we began by understanding and discussing the business goals and objectives of Wilkinson Sword. This was followed by in-depth research and analysis to ensure we would be delivering a fully optimised, future-proofed site structure to allow the new website to accelerate growth in all three target markets.
In order to protect organic visibility, and deliver a foundation for organic growth, we:
- considered international SEO best practice across all three country domains
- undertook comprehensive keyword research in each language to optimise the site for greater visibility, locally
- migrated the existing multiple sites into a master site using a sub-folder approach
- ensured full crawlability and indexability of the new website
- carefully monitored the migrations for common SEO issues and provided recommendations for any fixes needed
By bringing the multiple international domains under one umbrella domain, we centralised things neatly by using sub-folders, and combined the Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-A-T) of the existing sites into one.
Post-site launch, we continue to improve the visibility across the sites via monthly blog content production to boost Expertise, link building and digital PR campaigns to increase site Authority and constant technical and optimisation work to boost the ranking performance of the site.
In three years, Wilkinson Sword traffic has quadrupled in the UK and trebled in Germany.
Wilkinson Sword is now cemented on page 1 of the search results for all UK commercial target queries, plus its blog has captured 200+ featured snippets.
Previously, the UK sites didn’t rank for anything non-branded and only in and around page 1 of Google for brand terms. Both the UK and German websites now have more visibility than ever before and are achieving high ranking results.
The French site, which migrated over in recent months, is already showing similarly strong signs of success. Through plentiful search-led blog content, we also continue to extend the site footprint and improve the site’s E-A-T with Google.
Quote From Client
“The work undertaken by Distinctly has been first class ever since we started an initial consultancy project back in 2019.
“They fully understand our brand and our digital business goals and objectives.
“I would recommend Distinctly to all ecommerce companies wishing to improve their rankings, sales and achieve online success. The results achieved over the past few years really do speak for themselves.”
Ben Ford, Ecommerce Manager (DTC Europe), Wilkinson Sword
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