SUCCESS STORIES

Bondi Sands: Scaling International Visibility through SEO

When Bondi Sands, an Australian leader in sunless tanning, decided to go global, they faced a tough truth: strong brand reputation at home didn’t guarantee visibility overseas. Their search presence in the UK and US markets was fragmented, diluted, and underperforming.

They needed someone who could not just amplify what worked in Australia but build SEO strategies for multiple markets. StudioHawk partnered with them to unlock international growth.

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94%

increase in keywords - Australian market

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105%

increase in keywords - UK market

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54%

increase in keywords - US market

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The Need

Bondi Sands was already a premium brand in Australia — but to succeed globally, visibility needed to match.They were contending with:

Legacy URL duplication across international versions
Gaps in their category/intent match in UK/US vs AU
Weak internal linking to pages not in navigation
Technical SEO issues (JavaScript redirects, cross-region routing)
A content strategy that focused too heavily on brand terms, not generic user intent

Over time, these constraints were suppressing their ability to rank for high-volume, non-brand queries in key overseas markets.

As of early 2023, we have been actively engaged with Studio Hawk as our preferred SEO Agency Partner. Throughout this period, our collaboration has yielded numerous successes in both our SEO, content and technical strategies. The experience of working alongside the team, including Jenna, Lachlan, and Georgia, has been highly rewarding. Without hesitation, we wholeheartedly endorse Studio Hawk as an exceptional and dependable agency.

Tyler Velasquez

Global eCommerce Manager at Bondi Sands

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The Plan

We framed our goals in regional and unified terms:

Double the number of ranking keywords in each market within 12 months (AU, UK, US)
Build a holistic SEO strategy that could scale across all geographies
Outrank large marketplaces and generic competitors in target markets
Strengthen internal site architecture and content mapping to user intent

These objectives weren’t just aspirational — they were the blueprint for every technical, content, and linking decision we made.

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How: Architecture & IA Audits (International Focus)

To drive meaningful growth across multiple regions, we started with the foundations: site architecture and information architecture (IA). By combining technical SEO, content strategy, and international optimisation, we created a framework that would scale globally.

Along the way, we uncovered key opportunities:

Fixing duplication issues: A hidden URL was causing heavy duplication across all four regions. By resolving this, we removed cannibalisation and restored ranking strength.
Unlocking new categories: Through competitor analysis and gap research, we identified fresh category opportunities that better reflected how users actually searched.
Shifting from branded to intent-led terms: Pages that only ranked for branded queries were re-optimised to capture broader, high-value searches — for example, repositioning “wash off tan” to the more commonly searched “instant tan.”
Renaming for user intent (without losing brand voice): Several categories were restructured and renamed to align with searcher language, while collaborating closely with Bondi Sands to maintain brand positioning.
Strategic internal linking: We built a targeted linking framework to surface high-potential pages hidden outside the main navigation. A standout was “Self Tan” — which ultimately outranked all marketplace competitors that had historically siphoned traffic.

This combination of technical fixes and intent-driven adjustments set the stage for Bondi Sands to capture far more non-brand demand in international markets.

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How: Content

Content was a fast way to unlock early wins across all regions. We front-loaded the creation of 20 high-traffic pages, each tailored to match clear search intent and guide users more seamlessly through their tanning journey.

By building these pages first, we created a holistic site experience — one that not only answered user queries but also showcased complementary products and bundle options. The result was content that felt both useful and natural, while quietly boosting visibility for multiple product lines at once.

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How: Technical & International SEO

Behind the scenes, we uncovered technical issues that were quietly holding Bondi Sands back. Legacy JavaScript redirects were causing page duplication, wasting crawl budget, and diluting ranking signals. Cleaning these up immediately improved site performance and stability.

Internationally, misconfigured routing was sending some UK users to the EU site, a small error with a big impact, as those visitors bounced and conversions dropped. We corrected this by tightening hreflang and regional settings so users consistently landed on the right experience.

To make the business case clear, we mapped every recommended fix against projected revenue impact. This ensured technical changes weren’t just “SEO hygiene” but were directly tied to commercial outcomes.

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How: Link Acquisition

To secure Bondi Sands’ position at the top of international markets, we needed more than technical fixes and content — we needed authority. Our strategy focused on acquiring targeted, high-quality links that built topical relevance and lifted visibility for the pages that mattered most.

Rather than directing everything to the homepage, we deliberately pushed authority into newly optimised inner pages, helping them compete directly with marketplaces and category leaders. Anchor text was carefully balanced: always relevant to the target page, but diversified across branded, exact-match, and partial-match terms to maintain a natural profile.

Because Bondi Sands already had strong brand awareness, traditional Digital PR wasn’t the best lever. Instead, we created a niche outreach strategy through our existing relationships with health, beauty, wellness, and fashion publishers. By securing placements around semantically related content, we maximised keyword impact while strengthening the authority of their category and subcategory pages.

This approach didn’t just build links, It built credibility, giving Bondi Sands the authority to capture generic, high-volume search terms in markets where they were once lagging.

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Client success:

94%

increase in keywords - Australian market

105%

increase in keywords - UK market

54%

increase in keywords - US market

“Bondi Sands wanted to holistically grow their visibility across multiple target markets.t”

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Bondi Sands: Scaling International Visibility through SEO

Ready to expand globally? Let’s scale your SEO like Bondi Sands.

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