Website checklist for a small business in the Netherlands

A website makes you reachable. Being findable is a different job, and for most local businesses it does not start with the website.

Two kinds of search happen in your market every day. One is your name, typed by somebody who knows you. The other is what you sell, typed by somebody who does not. Most small businesses in the Netherlands win the first and are absent from the second.

This is the website checklist we work through when a small business in the Netherlands says it wants to be found, in the order that pays back fastest. It is deliberately boring at the top.

We have a website. So why are we not findable?

Because a website makes you reachable, not findable. Reachable is what happens once somebody has your name: they type it, they land on you, they call. Findable is winning a search where your name never appears, and that needs pages answering specific questions plus signals that say you exist at a real address doing real work.

The check takes a minute. Open a private window and search the way a customer would: the job plus the town, in the language they would use. If you are not on that page, "our website looks a bit dated" is not the explanation.

Your name is a search you already win. The searches that pay are the ones where your name never appears.

Should we start with the website or with Google Business Profile?

If most of your work comes from within an hour of your own door, start with the Google Business Profile. It is free, it feeds the map block above the ordinary results, and it moves without a single change to your site.

Google is unusually open about what decides those results. Its own guidance says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity: how well your profile matches the search, how far away you are, how well known you are. Distance is not yours to change. The other two are.

• Verify the profile. Google says a verified business is more likely to show up at all.
• Set the primary category precisely: the one that names the job, not the industry.
• List your services in the words customers use, not the words on your invoices.
• Fill in everything: opening hours, holiday hours, phone, and the address exactly as it is written on your site.
• Add photographs of real work, and keep adding them.
• Ask for a review after every finished job, and reply to all of them, including the ones that sting.

None of this replaces the website. Google still reads the site the profile points at, so a thin site caps what the profile can do. The profile is simply the part that moves first.

Which technical basics belong on a small business website checklist?

Speed on a real phone, one page per thing you sell, and a title and description written per page. None of the three is a redesign, and every one of them is checkable this afternoon.

• Test on a mid-range phone over mobile data, not on your desktop over fibre. That is the machine your customer is holding.
• One page per service, and per town only if you genuinely work there. A "Diensten" page listing six services competes properly for none of them.
• A unique title and description on every page. Copy-pasted ones are common on small sites, and they cost nothing to fix.
• Real text on the page. A phone number or a service list that only exists inside an image is invisible.
• HTTPS, one version of the domain, and a sitemap listing the pages you want found.

Then the redesign trap, because that is the expensive one. A new site that changes its URLs without redirecting the old ones throws away everything those pages had earned. Map every old URL to its replacement before launch, then check that the staging build’s "do not index" setting did not ship with the live design. That one is ordinary, and it takes a site off the map.

Should our content be in Dutch, English, or both?

Write in the language your customers search in. For most small businesses here that is Dutch, even when everyone in the building speaks fluent English.

The test is not what sounds professional to you. It is what your customer would type. If they would type "badkamer renoveren", a page headed "Bathroom renovation" is answering a question nobody asked.

Both is a legitimate choice, and it is twice the work rather than a switch: each language needs its own full pages, its own titles and descriptions, and hreflang annotations so the engines know which page is a version of which. A half-translated site reads as thin to a search engine and unfinished to a person. Unedited machine translation is that with more words.

English earns its place when your buyers work in English: international clients, expat customers, trades where the whole sector already speaks it. This site has a full English and a full Dutch version, because we work for Dutch businesses and for clients across Europe. That is a call about who it is for, and says nothing about who yours is for.

Does the domain matter: .nl or .com?

A little, and far less than the argument it usually causes. Google’s own documentation calls a country domain like .nl a strong signal that a site is intended for that country. A signal, and only that.

So: if you serve the Netherlands and the .nl is free, take it. If you already rank on a .com, do not move house for this alone. A domain move carries real risk and buys a signal, which is a poor trade.

The part of this section that pays is duller and free. Your name, address and phone number should be written identically everywhere a machine can read them: your site, your Google Business Profile, your KVK entry, your socials, every directory. Same street abbreviation, same phone format, same company name. Bakker B.V. and Bakker BV are two businesses to anything trying to work out whether you are one. Write the right version down once, then fix whatever disagrees.

What does authority mean for a local business?

Being named by other real sources near you. It has very little to do with how many links you have and almost everything to do with who is doing the naming.

How well known you are is what Google’s own page calls prominence, and it says that factor counts things like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. For a small business here, that is a short and unglamorous list.

• The branchevereniging or trade association you actually belong to.
• Suppliers and manufacturers whose dealer or installer pages list you by name.
• The local paper, the gemeente, the club you sponsor, as long as the sponsorship has a page with your name on it.
• Customers and partners who describe the job on their own site.
• Reviews arriving steadily over months, answered by a person rather than a template.

What does not work is everything that is easy to buy: directory blasts, link packages, guest posts on sites no human reads. They are cheap because they are worth nothing. The list above is slow because it is real.

How long before any of this moves?

Profile changes can show within days. Website changes take considerably longer, and anybody who hands you a date is guessing.

Which is why the order matters more than the effort. Profile first, because it is the fastest thing on the list. Then the pages you already have that nearly rank. Halfway down page two to the middle of page one is a far shorter trip than nothing to page one. Then the new pages.

Measure it in the right order too. Search Console counts an impression each time your site appears in a result, and a click only when somebody picks you, so impressions have to move before clicks do, and clicks before the phone rings. If impressions for the searches you care about are climbing, it is working, even in a month where nothing arrived. Give it months, not weeks, before deciding it failed.

That is the whole checklist, and very little of it needs an agency. An owner with a free Saturday can do the profile, the address consistency and half the technical list. The rest is the longer job: the site itself, the pages that have to rank, and making that content something AI assistants can answer from too, which our note on answer engine optimisation covers. Both of those sit under Web and SEO & AEO on our services page, and the booking page is there if you would rather talk it through.

If that is your week too, thirty minutes is enough to find out.

Book 30 minutes →