Local SEO in Belgium, from the ground up.

NAP consistency, and why it is first

NAP stands for name, address and phone. Google builds its confidence in a local business by seeing the same three strings repeated across independent sources: your own site, your Google Business Profile, the Yellow Pages entry somebody made in 2014, your Facebook page, the listing your accountant created with the company registration.

When those disagree, confidence drops, and a listing with lower confidence ranks lower or gets shown for fewer queries. The disagreements are almost always mundane:

• The company is BVBA in one place and SRL in another after the 2019 company-law change.
• The street is Rue de la Loi on the site and Wetstraat on the profile — the same street in the other language.
• The phone number is written +32 2 123 45 67 here and 02/123.45.67 there.
• An old mobile number still sits on a directory nobody remembers signing up to.

Pick one canonical form of each, including the formatting, and propagate it. The international format with the country code is the safest for the phone number, because it is unambiguous and a browser can dial it.

LocalBusiness schema

Schema markup is a block of JSON in the page that states the facts about the business in a form a machine reads without guessing. Without it, Google infers your address from text layout, which it does reasonably well and sometimes badly. With it, you have told it.

The type matters. LocalBusiness has around a hundred subtypes — Bakery, Dentist, Plumber, HairSalon, Restaurant. Using the specific one is better than the generic parent. The block should carry the address, the phone, the opening hours, the geo coordinates and the URL, and every value in it must match the visible page and the Business Profile. Schema that contradicts the page is worse than no schema.

The directories that count here

Belgium has a small set of sources that carry real weight because Google has been reading them for years, plus a long tail that does very little. Worth the time:

What is not worth it: paid bulk citation packages that fire your details at three hundred low-quality sites. They introduce new inconsistencies faster than they add authority, and you cannot easily correct them later.

Two languages, two sets of pages

A Belgian business selling in both Flanders and Wallonia is competing in two search markets with different vocabulary. Doing that properly means one URL per language per page, each with its own title and description, and hreflang tags on each pointing to its siblings so Google serves the right one rather than picking.

Client-side translation widgets do not achieve this. If the alternate language only exists after JavaScript swaps the text, there is frequently no second page for Google to index at all — you have one page in one language with a language switcher on it. In Brussels specifically the split cuts through a single city, which makes it harder to ignore.

Reviews

Review volume and recency both feed the map pack. Recency is the part businesses underestimate: forty reviews from 2021 age badly against a competitor picking up two a month. A short, direct request at the moment the work is finished outperforms every automated sequence, and asking by text message outperforms asking by email.

Do not buy reviews, and do not offer a discount in exchange for one. Both are against Google's policy, both are detectable at scale, and the penalty lands on the listing you depend on.

What this looks like as a job

For most small businesses, the whole of the above is a few hours of careful work and then maintenance. That is why we start with a free 28-point check rather than a proposal: six of those points are the listing side, done by hand, and they are usually where the actual finding is.