Rent-a-car in Spain and Italy: real multi-country SEO case (what worked, what didn't)

We took on the organic visibility of a transport rental company working two markets at once: Spain and Italy. Vehicles for groups, set routes and transfers to tourist spots, in two of the most competitive destinations in Europe.

The challenge

The brief was not «show up on Google». It was direct bookings, which is a different thing: the business depended on international aggregators that took a commission on every booking they had gone out and found themselves.

Two markets that don’t search alike

The first thing the data from both countries shows is that an Italian and a Spaniard don’t type the same words when they want the same service. Not the same terms, not the same point in the trip, not the same questions before booking. Treating both markets as one translated market is the mistake that was already made.

Where we started

Before writing a single new word, two things had to be fixed that made any content useless: the site wasn’t telling Google which version to serve to each country, and it was slow on mobile — exactly where most of the sector’s searches happen.

With that solved, the content was written per market, not translated from the other. Every service and every area has its own page, with what someone needs in order to decide: what it includes, for how many people, where it leaves from and what it costs. And the links were sought where they matter — media and tourism portals in both countries.

What moved in seven months

The number that actually changed the business isn’t the traffic: it’s the 39% more direct bookings. Those are bookings that used to come through an aggregator, with its commission, and now come through the client’s own site.

What this case taught us

That in an international project the order matters more than the volume. Publishing a hundred new pages before fixing hreflang would have thrown the work away: Google would have kept showing the wrong version to each country. First you fix what stops the content from landing, and only then do you write.