wed2b has grown to be the UK’s largest nationwide bridal retailer, designing wedding dresses for every style, shape and budget. The British retailer is the go-to destination for affordable bridal wear. Since launching in 2009, the company has opened 59 stores across the UK, Ireland, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands offering the perfect marriage of affordability, exclusivity and luxury.
We needed expertise, and that’s what Reddico brought to the table.
Richard McAuley, Senior Web Developer & Digital Strategist, wed2b
The brief
When we first met wed2b, one of their biggest priorities was to grow their visibility within the German market as this was an area where they were expanding their physical presence rapidly.
The domain wasn’t ranking inside the top 100 positions for any commercial non-branded terms within Germany, especially for queries such as 'brautkleider' and 'hochzeitskleider' (translates to wedding dresses in English).
The website had good visibility in the UK, so we needed to identify and unpick the issues that were holding back the domain in Germany.
What we did
As with any new client, we started out by conducting a full site audit.
Our technical audit showed:
Crawlability issues resulting in Google reaching URLs serving 404 and 500 errors.
Google was able to crawl and index low-quality pages.
Several key pages were missing from the XML sitemap.
Site speed issues resulted in poor scores for core web vitals.
Our on-page audits for wed2b.com/de-de/brautkleider also revealed:
wed2b were not targeting both brautkleider or hochzeitskleider within their meta title.
Above the fold content on mobile was being hidden and not expanded as default.
Internal linking to the target page could be improved and include optimised anchor text.
On-page image alt text was using the English language rather than the native German language.
There was an opportunity to include structured data on the page.
The target page was lacking in supplementary content when compared to competitors.
In addition to addressing these issues, we provided on-page guidance around heading structures, highlighted and educated the team on the importance of internal linking and structured data. There’s still further work to be done to strengthen site content for other pages, but our collaborative efforts are now paying dividends.
The web2b team have also been excellent to work with, quickly rolling out changes and shown an eagerness to test different methods.
The results
As of January 2022, the website entered the top 5 ranking positions for the terms brautkleider and hochzeitskleider. Both these terms had previously never been inside the top 100.
The wed2b.com/de-de/brautkleider page now receives +700% increase in daily visits since entering page one for brautkleider and hochzeitskleider.
German non-branded search terms now hold first-page rankings, with 102 keywords in the top ten compared to just two a year ago.
In turn, this has translated into a staggering 1,563% increase in non-branded traffic in Germany. Visits to the local store pages have grown by 103% and store footfall has risen by 538%.
We needed expertise, and that’s what Reddico brought to the table. Their deep understanding of SEO was evident in the strategies they employed, tailored to our specific needs. If you are seeking an SEO partner who truly understands the intricacies of SEO and can translate that knowledge into tangible results, Reddico is the one. Their commitment to excellence is evident in the results they deliver. Richard McAuley, Senior Web Developer & Digital Strategist, wed2b
