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 matching family holiday 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 across Silly Santa’s seven domains#

Before the fix, Silly Santa ran sillysanta.de, sillysanta.dk, sillysanta.fi, sillysanta.nl, sillysanta.no, sillysanta.se and sillysanta.uk with no hreflang signals connecting them. Skalum’s write-up says that left Google to guess which domain should surface for a given country’s searches, and in practice, non-local domains sometimes outranked the correct one, so a share of a market’s organic traffic was landing on the wrong storefront. Norway is the clearest documented case: before the change, only about 80% of the traffic reaching the Norway domain from organic search was actually coming from Norwegian searchers.

The fix: hreflang across all seven ccTLDs, not one subfolder#

Skalum reports it implemented hreflang annotations 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 fix was purely in the signals declaring which domain serves which country-language pair.

What Skalum reports changed, season over 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 orders.

Norway’s local traffic share, the 80% to 93% figure, is the metric that most directly reflects what hreflang fixes: less of that domain’s organic traffic being drawn from, or leaking to, the wrong country version.

Why this is a vendor case study, not an isolated hreflang test#

Skalum’s page attributes the season-over-season gains to the hreflang rollout, but the case study does not claim hreflang was the only change made in that twelve-month gap, and a year-over-year comparison can absorb seasonality, market growth, or other SEO and paid-marketing work alongside it. 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.