SEO, short for search engine optimisation, is the work of making your website easy for search engines to find, read and trust, so that it can show up when someone searches for what you do. For a local business, that mostly means being found by people nearby: “hairdresser Turnhout”, “restaurant open Sunday”, “B&B near me”.
Between May and September 2026 I looked at 67 local businesses around Turnhout: restaurants, B&Bs, hair salons and physiotherapists. 38 of them had a Facebook page and no website of their own. A Facebook page can be found, but it is not yours, and it says very little to a search engine about what you do and where.
How does Google decide what to show?
Google describes its own process in three stages:
- Crawling. Automated programs visit pages and download the text, images and video on them.
- Indexing. Google analyses what it found and stores it in its index, a very large database.
- Serving results. When someone searches, Google picks the pages from that index it considers most relevant and useful for that search.
SEO is about doing well at each stage: making sure your pages can be visited, that they can be understood, and that they are a good answer to what people actually search for.
One thing Google is explicit about: it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher. Ads are a separate product, clearly marked as sponsored. The unpaid results cannot be bought.
What is local SEO?
When a search has a local intent, Google usually shows a map with a few businesses on it before the ordinary results. Those places come from Google Business Profiles, not directly from websites.
Google names three things that decide who appears there:
- Relevance: how well a profile matches what was searched.
- Distance: how far the business is from the person searching, or from the place in the search.
- Prominence: how well known the business is, which includes reviews and what the rest of the web says about it.
You cannot change your distance. You can do a lot about relevance and prominence, and most of it starts with your profile. The Google Business Profile guide goes through it step by step.
What does SEO on a website involve?
It splits into three parts.
The technical base. The site has to load fast on a phone, work on every screen size, allow search engines in, and tell them which pages exist (a sitemap). Structured data, a small block of code that states your name, address, hours and type of business in a format machines read, removes guesswork. If the site has several languages, each version needs its own address and a tag that tells Google which language it is in.
The pages themselves. Every page has a title and a short description, which are usually what Google shows in its results. Each page is about one thing, with clear headings, and says plainly what you do, where, and for whom. A salon that writes “we offer a wide range of services” tells Google very little. “Balayage, cuts and colour in Turnhout, open Saturdays” tells it a lot.
Trust. Your name, address and phone number are the same everywhere they appear: your site, your profile, social media and directories. Real reviews, real photos, and other local sites that mention or link to you all count.
| Part | Who usually does it | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Technical base | Whoever builds the site | Once, then kept right |
| Titles, descriptions, page content | The builder and the owner together | At the start, then when things change |
| Business Profile, reviews, photos | The owner, with help if needed | Every week or month |
What can I do myself this week?
You do not need a developer for any of these:
- Check your Google Business Profile. Is the category right, are the hours right, including holidays, and does it link to your site?
- Make your details identical everywhere. Same name, same address, same phone number, written the same way.
- Ask happy customers for a review. Simply ask, at the moment they are happy. Never buy reviews or write your own.
- Answer the reviews you already have. Thank people first, keep it short, and never argue.
- Write the way your customers search. Name your town, your services and your opening days in plain words.
How long does SEO take?
A new page can take from a few days to a few weeks before Google even visits it. After that, positions move slowly, and they depend on how many other businesses compete for the same searches near you. A barber in a small town and a restaurant in a city centre face very different markets.
It happened to my own site. On 28 September 2026 every page of ovrick.com was readable for search engines, and searching for the name still found nothing: Google had first visited the site while it was marked as not ready for indexing, and coming back takes its own time. Nothing was broken. It was simply early.
That is also why nobody can honestly promise you a position or a number of visitors. Anyone who does is guessing. What can be promised is the work: a site that is technically sound, pages that say clearly what you do, and a profile that is complete and kept up to date.
What about AI answers?
More and more searches end in a written answer: Google’s AI summaries, or a chat assistant asked “where can I get a good haircut in Turnhout?”. These tools read the same web. A site that states its facts clearly, in text and in structured data, with a complete Business Profile and real reviews behind it, gives them something reliable to repeat. Nothing about this replaces the basics above; it rewards them.
How does Ovrick handle SEO?
I build the technical base into every site: speed measured on a phone, metadata, structured data and pages search engines can read, and I tell you up front which of your languages search engines will index. On Orbit, every page gets its own title and description, and I set up or review your Google Business Profile with you. On the Boost plan, there is monthly SEO and copy work on top. I sell the work, never a ranking. The pricing page shows which plan includes what. You can see that base in practice on the demo sites.