Bondi Sands is Australia's #1 self-tanning brand. They'd already won at home — the challenge was search dominance in UK and US markets where the competitive landscape was completely different. This was one of the international SEO accounts I oversaw at StudioHawk that required the most nuanced approach.
The Problem
Legacy URL duplication across international versions of the site. JavaScript redirects causing crawl issues. Hreflang misconfiguration routing users to wrong regions. Category and intent gaps between markets — what Australian users search for is fundamentally different from UK and US beauty queries. And over-reliance on branded terms meant zero visibility for the non-brand discovery queries that drive new customer acquisition.
What We Built
- Architecture audit: Fixed URL duplication, identified new category pages needed per market, and renamed for local user intent
- 20 high-traffic pages targeting search intent across AU, UK, and US regions
- Technical fixes: Resolved JavaScript redirects, corrected hreflang configuration, and fixed regional routing
- Link acquisition: Targeted high-quality links to inner pages through health, beauty, and wellness publishers in each market
The Results
- Australia: 94% increase in ranking keywords
- UK: 105% increase in ranking keywords
- US: 54% increase in ranking keywords
"Throughout this period, our collaboration has yielded numerous successes in both our SEO, content and technical strategies." — Tyler Velasquez, Global eCommerce Manager
Bondi Sands was proof that international SEO isn't about duplicating what works in one market. Each region needs its own strategy, its own content, its own link profile. The infrastructure I built at StudioHawk let us run three distinct strategies under one account without dropping quality.