Mons Royale SEO Case Study

Mons Royale is a Wanaka-based merino wool performance apparel brand. Base layers, mid layers, jackets, bike jerseys and underwear built for snow, bike and the outdoors. Sustainability and transparency sit at the heart of the brand, and their global reach spans six regional Shopify storefronts: Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, EU and Switzerland.

They compete in the natural fibre apparel category against Icebreaker and Smartwool, and need to be visible across every geography without cannibalising themselves.

When we started working with Mons Royal the international SEO was a tangle.

• Six storefronts, one mess. Each region ran on its own subdomain. Hreflang tags were incomplete and inconsistent, so Google was serving the wrong store in branded search. US pages were showing up in Australian SERPs. The .com was outranking regional sites in their own markets.
• The region selector problem. monsroyale.com was a single-page region selector that ranked first globally for the brand. It hoarded backlink authority, distorted analytics, and pushed bounce rates well past anything healthy.
• A high-stakes US migration on the horizon. Mons Royale wanted to move us.monsroyale.com onto the root domain - a big move on a page that already ranked strongly in global search.
• Multi-store reporting overhead. Six properties, multiple GA4 environments, multiple GSC views. Getting all that into something the brand team could actually use was a project in itself.

1. Hreflang rebuilt across all six storefronts

We mapped every URL across every region, then built a proper hreflang structure so Google served the right store to the right audience. We worked through the edge cases and got branded search behaving the way it should.

2. US subdomain to root domain migration

We ran the migration of us.monsroyale.com onto monsroyale.com. Mapped redirects, sense-checked the implementation, monitored post-launch. The US store inherited the .com's authority without losing organic traffic.

3. Region selector consolidation

We rebuilt the role of the root domain. Instead of a one-page interstitial eating authority and skewing analytics, the .com now serves the US market directly, with a geolocation prompt for users landing in the wrong place.

4. Multi-region content program

Our content team built evergreen briefs on merino topics that worked across all six regions. The Journal became a genuine SEO asset rather than just a brand blog.

5. Peak season SEO

We layered Black Friday and peak season recommendations on top of the always-on work, timed to the brand's biggest sales windows across both hemispheres.

6. Consolidated multi-region reporting

We built a reporting cadence that pulled GA4, GSC and AccuRanker data across every region into a single monthly view, so the brand team could see global performance at a glance.

Organic revenue grew 50% year on year over the engagement, with organic traffic up 22% across the brand. The US migration delivered the rare combination of no traffic loss and immediate uplift, with the root domain effectively doubling its organic visibility in the two months after launch. 

The AU site moved from being outranked by the global .com in its home market to taking the top spot for branded search in Australia, and the same pattern played out across the other regions as hreflang took effect. Across the engagement, referring domains grew 74% and domain rating stepped up alongside it.