Where they started
A UK sports-nutrition retailer had launched a Spanish store under /es/ and, six months in, was baffled by the silence. The pages existed, were crawlable, and read fine. But in Spain they didn’t rank, and the reason was almost funny once we saw it: for Spanish queries, Google was serving the retailer’s own UK pages. In Madrid, a searcher for “proteína aislada” got the English product page, priced in pounds. The /es/ set had been built as a straight translation of the English site with hreflang tags added, but the tags were one-directional: the UK pages pointed at the Spanish alternates, and the Spanish pages never pointed back. Without return tags, Google treated the cluster as broken and defaulted to the older, stronger UK URLs. The Spanish store was a ghost sitting on top of a healthy DR-52 domain.
What we did
- Completed the hreflang return tags across every localized URL so each ES page and its UK counterpart referenced each other, plus a proper x-default. This is what ended the UK-outranks-ES problem; validation cleared inside a crawl cycle and Spain started seeing the right pages.
- Ran native es-ES keyword research, not translation. Spanish shoppers don’t search the literal translation of the English terms: the demand, the product names, and the modifiers were different, which is why the translated pages had found only 300 keywords.
- Rewrote category and product copy for the ES market against that real demand, so the newly-visible pages actually matched what people searched rather than reading as converted English.
- Built 64 links from Spanish media (sports, fitness and nutrition outlets) to give the ES section its own authority signals in-market rather than borrowing entirely from the UK domain.
The tag fix was the unlock, not the growth engine. It made a well-built store visible; the native research and localized copy are what turned that visibility into 4,600 keywords and 14k sessions. Growth stayed flat for the first six weeks while validation propagated, then went vertical once Google trusted the cluster.