Silly Santa's 7-country hreflang rollout: a Skalum case study

Skalum, an ecommerce-focused SEO agency, publishes named client case studies rather than anonymized ones. One of them covers Silly Santa, a Shopify apparel brand that sells Christmas sweaters and pajamas across seven European markets, each on its own country-code domain. The case study is a useful, if vendor-published, look at what a from-scratch hreflang rollout across several ccTLDs actually changes in Search Console and GA4 data, as opposed to a single subfolder launch.

What was broken#

Silly Santa runs sillysanta.de, sillysanta.dk, sillysanta.fi, sillysanta.nl, sillysanta.no, sillysanta.se and sillysanta.uk. Skalum’s write-up says part of the organic traffic also came from countries with similar languages, which it says is not inherently bad but distorts a domain’s market fit. Norway is the clearest documented case: Skalum reports its local traffic share rose from 80% to 93% once hreflang assigned the market.

The fix: hreflang on all seven#

Skalum reports it implemented hreflang across all language and country versions, covering all seven domains, to establish what the case study calls clean country targeting in the SERPs. Unlike a subfolder migration, this is a ccTLD hreflang rollout: the domains stayed separate, and the hreflang signals declare which domain serves which country-language pair. It was not the only change: Skalum also lists a metadata and heading overhaul, collection-page work, local link building and internal linking.

What changed, season on season#

Skalum compares the same six-month season a year apart, August 1 to January 31, once for 2024 to 2025 and once for 2025 to 2026, which covers the brand’s holiday selling period both times. Across that window, the case study reports organic users rose on every one of the seven domains, from a 12.6% increase in Norway to a 297.5% increase in the UK. Norway’s organic revenue index rose 39.9% in the same period despite the smaller user increase, and the UK’s organic revenue index rose from 100 to 250.4, a 150.4% increase. Sitewide, Skalum reports keywords ranking in the top 3 positions grew from 1,813 to 3,027, and seasonal organic sales grew from 14,634 to 24,259.

Norway’s local traffic share, the 80% to 93% figure, is the metric that most directly reflects what hreflang targets: in Skalum’s words, less spillover across similar-language regions.

Why this is a vendor’s case#

Skalum’s page presents the season-over-season gains as the result of a system: hreflang, local content, link building, internal linking and Shopify UX work together. Hreflang cannot be separated from the rest, and a year-over-year comparison can also absorb seasonality, market growth or paid marketing. Norway’s traffic-share metric is the one number in the case study that isolates the specific effect hreflang is meant to have, correct country attribution, rather than overall traffic growth, which is why it is worth reading separately from the revenue and user totals.