A global electronics and print-technology manufacturer had a search problem hiding inside a structural one. A previous migration had tried to merge two very different businesses, a B2B division and a B2C division, into a single site structure, and had done it badly. The result was tens of thousands of broken URLs across 24 country-facing domains, redirects pointing nowhere useful, and international targeting that served the wrong pages to the wrong markets. My remit was to improve search performance across the EMEA-facing platform. The real task was to decide what the structure should have been in the first place, and then get a large organisation to build it.
What I inherited
The platform ran on a custom PHP content management system, which meant every structural decision had to be planned with the developers who owned that code. Nothing could be solved by installing a plugin.
Across the estate, the botched migration had left tens of thousands of URLs needing 301 redirects, hreflang that failed to tell search engines which page belonged to which country and language, and a URL structure that made no consistent sense from one domain to the next. B2B and B2C content had been folded together in a way that served neither audience cleanly. There was a great deal of technical debt, and no agreed picture of what “fixed” should look like.
The problem wasn’t the redirects
It would have been possible to spend months mapping redirects and still fix nothing that mattered. The problem wasn’t the redirects. It was that no one owned the structure they were meant to point to.
Tens of thousands of 301s are only as good as the architecture behind them, redirect into a mess and you have simply preserved the mess. So the first decision wasn’t technical. It was to define one clean, consistent structure that every country’s domain would follow, and that kept the B2B and B2C journeys coherent rather than blended. Everything else, the redirects, the hreflang, the developer work, followed from that single decision.
Turning a plan into something a business could build
A structure on a slide is worthless until an organisation actually implements it. This is where most large SEO projects quietly die: the recommendation is sound, but nobody turns it into sequenced, developer-ready work that stakeholders across markets will agree to.
I worked directly with the development team to translate the target structure into an implementation plan the custom CMS could support, sequenced so that URL changes, redirects and hreflang went live in the right order rather than all at once. I separated what to merge, what to separate, what to redirect and what to leave untouched, and I made those decisions legible to the country stakeholders who each had a view on their own market. My job was to keep 24 domains, several teams and one development backlog moving towards the same structure.
Getting international targeting right
With the structure agreed, hreflang could finally do its job, telling search engines cleanly which page serves which country and language, so a German buyer lands on the German B2B page rather than a stray consumer page from another market. Done properly across 24 domains, this stops markets competing with one another in search and stops the business splitting its own authority across near-duplicate pages.
The homogenised structure meant every domain now behaved consistently. That made the whole estate easier to crawl, cheaper to maintain and far simpler to grow.
Owning the local layer
Search doesn’t stop at the website. The business had more than 40 physical locations, and their Google Business Profiles were inconsistent, partly unclaimed and often wrong, a direct problem for anyone searching locally for a nearby office or service.
Working with Yext, I first secured ownership of those profiles, an access and stakeholder problem as much as a technical one, then standardised and correctly localised all 40+ so that each location showed accurate, consistent information in the language of its market. That turned a scattered set of listings into a single, dependable local-search asset.
The outcome
The migration stopped losing what it had been quietly leaking. Instead of tens of thousands of broken URLs bleeding authority, the estate consolidated into one coherent structure, each market served its correct pages, and 40+ locations presented a consistent local presence.
The commercial value wasn’t a single clever tactic. It was an international search platform that finally worked as one system, instead of two businesses forced awkwardly into one.
Why this needed a lead, not a specialist
Any specialist can write a redirect map. Any agency can hand over an hreflang audit. Neither gets tens of thousands of URLs, a custom CMS, a room full of country stakeholders and a third-party vendor all moving in the same direction.
That coordination, not the individual fixes, was the work. The plan was the straightforward part. Owning it across development, local market teams and a vendor, and keeping every decision tied to the commercial result, is what a fractional SEO lead is actually for.
Book an SEO leadership call
If you have SEO activity across multiple markets but nobody senior owns the structure, that is the exact gap I fill. The usual starting point is an SEO Leadership Review, a fixed-scope diagnostic that ends in a 90-day priority roadmap.