SEO in Brussels, described honestly.

There are two results pages, not one

When someone in Etterbeek searches for a plumber, Google returns two things stacked on one screen. At the top sits the map pack: three businesses with a pin, a star rating and an opening time. Below it sits the ordinary list of blue links. They are ranked by different machinery, and a business can sit first in one and nowhere in the other.

The map pack is drawn almost entirely from Google Business Profile — the listing, not the website. Proximity to the searcher, the categories on the profile, review volume and recency, and whether the name, address and phone number match what other directories say about you. The blue links below are ranked the ordinary way: pages, content, links, technical health.

For most small local businesses the map pack is where the money is, and it is also the part that gets ignored, because it does not live on the website and so nobody treats it as part of the website. The Business Profile side is worth its own page.

The language split is a ranking problem, not a translation problem

Brussels is officially bilingual. In practice a majority of local searches happen in French, a substantial minority in Dutch, and a real slice in English from the EU and expat population. A site published only in English is competing for a fraction of the demand.

The mistake worth naming: running the site through a translation plugin and assuming that covers it. Google indexes the served HTML. If the French only appears after a client-side script swaps the text, there is often nothing French in the page for Google to rank. Real multilingual coverage means separate URLs per language, each with its own title, description and hreflang annotations pointing at its siblings.

It also means picking the right phrase rather than the dictionary one. People search dépannage plomberie Bruxelles, not services de plomberie. The literal translation of an English keyword is usually not the phrase anyone types.

The nineteen communes

Brussels-Capital is nineteen municipalities, and people search by commune rather than by city. Ixelles, Schaerbeek, Uccle, Saint-Gilles and Anderlecht are all distinct search terms with distinct competition. A business that names only "Brussels" on its site is generic against every other business in the region.

This is not an invitation to build nineteen near-identical pages, one per commune, with the name swapped. Google calls those doorway pages and they are an explicit spam policy violation. The honest version: name the communes you genuinely serve in the page copy, put the real address in the markup, and let proximity do the rest. If you have two real locations, that is two Business Profiles and two pages — earned, not manufactured.

What actually moves a local ranking

Roughly in order of how much difference it makes for a small business here, and how quickly:

1. Claim and complete the Business Profile. Primary category, hours, service area, photos. Free, same-week effect on the map pack.
2. Make name, address and phone identical everywhere. Your site, your profile, the directories that already list you. Inconsistency is the commonest reason a listing underperforms.
3. Ask for reviews and reply to them. Volume and recency both count. Reply rate is visible to customers even where it is not a ranking factor.
4. Put the address and a tappable phone number in the page itself, with LocalBusiness schema around it, so Google can cross-check the listing against the site.
5. Fix what the site gets wrong technically. Titles, headings, canonical tags, mobile viewport, page weight. Necessary, rarely sufficient.
6. Earn links from Belgian sites. Slow, durable, and the hardest of the six.

Notice that the first three cost nothing and touch no code. Anyone quoting a monthly retainer before they have done those three is selling the wrong thing first.

What we do about it

Uplift runs a free 28-point check on your page and your listing before any conversation happens: twenty-two automated against the live page, six done by hand because they need Google's data or human judgement. You get the findings in writing within 24 hours. If the fixes are small, we say so and you can do them yourself. If the site is the problem, we say that too, and rebuilding it is the honest answer rather than a retainer.