The fight you won't win
On « renovation », « lawyer » or « cleaning », the top places belong to directories, marketplaces and national chains. No point exhausting yourself there.
The search that matters to you has a name: local search.
What your clients actually type
The searches that end in a call are precise and located: the trade, the municipality, sometimes the urgency. « Property manager Uccle », « physio Saint-Gilles », « boiler repair Schaerbeek Sunday ». There the competition is your size.
The business profile comes before the site
For a small business the Google profile often carries more weight than the site itself: it feeds the map and the local results block.
- Exact primary category — it decides which searches you're a candidate for. An approximate category excludes you from everything else.
- Hours kept current — including Belgian public holidays. Wrong hours lose clients and damage ranking.
- Real, recent photos — your front, your team, your work. No stock images.
- A reply to every review — including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. A calm, factual reply reassures more than ten stars.
One page per service, one page per area
A single « Our services » page listing eight offerings will rank for none. Eight pages, one per offering, each rank for their own.
Same logic for the municipalities you genuinely cover. But a page per municipality only works if it contains something true: a job you did there, a travel time, a local constraint. Twenty identical pages with the name swapped are detected and ignored.
French and Dutch
Brussels is officially bilingual and part of your clientele searches in Dutch. Two mistakes usually overlap.
The first: translating mechanically. People don't search for the literal translation of your French words.
The second: mixing both languages on one page. Each language needs its own addresses, and the two versions must declare each other.