01Who the Client Is
An export-focused LED lighting company covering commercial and architectural lighting, running a multilingual website in English, German and French. Germany is one of its core target markets, yet the German site had never produced organic traffic.
02What the Client Was Struggling With
- The multilingual site was live, butGerman pages barely indexed by Google;
- organic traffic from the German market was close to zero, and inquiries came only from trade fairs and ads;
- the English site ranked, while opening the German site felt like looking at something invisible;
- the team concluded there was not enough German content and prepared to translate a large batch of new pages.
03What We Found
The problem was content volume — it was technical configuration:
- Missing hreflang self-references: no language version declared itself, which invalidated the entire hreflang set;
- Misused market codes: invented regional combinations replaced valid ISO codes (such as EU / APAC), which Google cannot interpret;
- Pointing at redirecting pages: some hreflang entries pointed at URLs that issue a 301 redirect, making the declaration useless;
- Content that was never truly localised: the German pages were machine translated, lacking the phrasing and units German buyers expect.
04What We Did
- Fix two-way hreflang references: every language page lists all variants including itself, closing the reciprocal-reference loop;
- Add x-default: specify the default fallback version so Google does not pick the wrong one;
- Remove hreflang pointing at redirects, and point every entry at pages returning 200 and indexable;
- German localised content: had native speakers rewrite the key pages, adjusting phrasing, units and certification wording;
- Restructure the multilingual architecture: consolidate the subdirectory structure so language versions stop competing with each other.
05How the Numbers Moved
Data source: Google Search Console. Company names and part of the commercial data are anonymised to protect client privacy.
| Metric | Before the fix | Month 3 | Month 6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DE site organic traffic (monthly) | XX | XX | XX |
| DE top 10 keywords | XX | XX | XX |
| DE site qualified leads (monthly) | XX | XX | XX |
| German page index rate | Very low | Back to normal | Stable |
06Client Feedback
It turned out not to be a shortage of German content — technical configuration had invalidated the whole hreflang group. Three months after the fix, the German site finally showed organic visits.
C
Client CCEO · LED Lighting Exporter · Netherlands
At the client's request, the company name and personal names are anonymised.
07Key Takeaways From This Case
- Multilingual sites usually break here, Eight times out of ten, multilingual sites are stuck on hreflang and indexing, not the amount of content;
- hreflang needsa self-reference plus reciprocal links, miss one item and the whole group fails;
- Localisation is not translation. German buyers read phrasing and certifications, not word-for-word equivalence.