A specialty coffee roaster selling through separate storefronts for the US, Canada, and UK asked us why customers kept landing on the wrong country's site, and why Google seemed to be showing the wrong version in each market entirely.
The Situation
Each storefront had nearly identical content with only pricing, currency, and a handful of product details changed. Without proper signals telling Google which version belonged to which audience, the search engine was essentially guessing, and guessing wrong more often than not.
What We Found
The site had no hreflang tags at all, the markup that tells search engines which page variant serves which country or language, a concept we cover in our explainer on international SEO. Without it, Google was frequently showing UK customers the US storefront, complete with the wrong currency and shipping information.
What We Did
We implemented proper hreflang tags across all three storefronts, making sure each page correctly referenced its counterparts in the other two markets, cleaned up a few self-referencing errors where a page incorrectly pointed to itself as an alternate version, and verified everything using Search Console's international targeting reports.
The Result
Within a month, the right storefront started showing up for the right country consistently, checkout abandonment dropped in the UK and Canadian markets specifically, since customers were no longer confused by mismatched currency at checkout, and organic traffic in both secondary markets increased as their storefronts started ranking independently instead of losing out to the US version.
The Takeaway
Running multiple country or language versions of a site without hreflang tags isn't just a minor technical gap, it actively sends customers and search engines to the wrong page. It's worth checking as part of any technical SEO audit, especially before expanding into a new region rather than after customers start complaining.
Selling or serving customers across more than one country? Talk to Rafenthic's team about an international SEO review.