Case Study: International SEO Across 36+ Countries for an Industrial Manufacturer (Katlax)

Katlax makes industrial connectors and automation components, and sells into more than 36 countries through a mix of direct export, distributors, and regional resellers. When they came to us, the brief wasn't "grow our traffic" — it was "our site doesn't know who it's talking to." One URL was trying to rank for buyers in Germany, Brazil, and the UAE simultaneously, in English, with no signal to Google about which market it actually served. That's the problem international SEO for manufacturers usually starts with, and it's the problem we scoped against.

The situation: one site, dozens of buyers, zero market signals

Katlax's product pages were written for an engineer who already knew what a connector does. That's fine for a domestic audience with existing relationships, but it's a liability internationally, where a procurement manager in a new market is often searching in their own language, comparing specs against local standards (IEC vs UL vs GB, for instance), and landing on a page that assumes context they don't have. The site had no country or language targeting at all — just one global English version, indexed everywhere, ranking inconsistently, and occasionally getting outranked in its own target markets by distributors reselling the same products.

We started, as we do with every international SEO engagement, by refusing to treat "36 countries" as one problem. It's really three or four different problems wearing the same trench coat: technical targeting, content localization, competitive dynamics with resellers, and standards/compliance language that varies by region.

How we scoped the work

We split the 36+ countries into three tiers based on revenue concentration and search volume, not evenly across the board. That's a decision worth being honest about: we did not give every market equal SEO investment, because that would have spread effort so thin it would have helped no one. Tier 1 markets got dedicated landing pages with local technical standards referenced explicitly. Tier 2 markets got shared regional pages (e.g., one page serving several Southeast Asian markets in English, since English was the commercial lingua franca in Katlax's actual sales conversations there). Tier 3 markets — smaller, opportunistic export relationships — got no dedicated SEO work at all in the first phase. That was a trade-off the client signed off on explicitly, and it's the kind of call a lot of agencies avoid stating out loud.

What broke first: hreflang

Before we touched content, we had to fix the plumbing. Katlax's CMS hadn't been built with multi-market targeting in mind, so implementing proper hreflang meant restructuring URLs for the priority markets — moving from one flat English site to a structure that could actually say "this page is for German buyers, this one is for Brazilian buyers" without contradicting itself. We followed Google Search Central's guidance on hreflang implementation closely here, because the failure mode with hreflang isn't dramatic — it's silent. Google just quietly ignores badly implemented tags and serves whichever page it thinks is most relevant, which defeats the entire point.

The distributor problem nobody plans for

A chunk of Katlax's regional visibility issues had nothing to do with their own site. Several long-standing distributors had copied Katlax spec sheets and product descriptions onto their own e-commerce pages, sometimes years earlier, and those pages occasionally outranked Katlax's own product pages in the distributor's home market. This isn't a technical SEO fix — it's a relationship conversation. We flagged which distributor pages were causing the most direct competition, and left it to Katlax's sales team to decide how hard to push for changes, since distributor relationships carry commercial weight beyond SEO. We didn't chase every instance; we prioritized the ones actually costing visibility in Tier 1 markets.

What we'd do differently

Looking back, we'd have pushed harder in month one to get a decision on the CMS's long-term ability to support proper URL structures, rather than working around its limitations for the first few months. We also underestimated how much internal alignment Katlax's global sales team needed before we could get sign-off on which markets fell into which tier — that conversation should have started in week one of scoping, not week three. And we'd build the distributor-conflict audit into the initial technical audit phase instead of treating it as a follow-on discovery, since it changed some of our page-priority decisions after the fact.

International SEO for manufacturers is rarely a content problem first. It's a "who is this page actually for" problem, and most sites can't answer that at a URL level before you start.

If you're scoping something similar

If you sell into more than a handful of countries, the tiering decision above is the one to make explicitly and early — which markets get dedicated pages, which get shared coverage, and which get monitored but not built for. We've written more on the technical side of this in our guide to international SEO for manufacturers and on the broader technical foundation in our technical SEO for manufacturing websites piece. If you want to talk through how this kind of scoping would apply to your own market spread, reach us at hello@tikbo.in or through our contact page.