“Not a lot of companies are doing SEO in Luxembourg”

Apart Design Studio managing partner and digital art director, Claude Folschette says a holistic search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy can be a game changer to improve company rankings.

What makes a good SEO strategy?

On the technical side, a lot is related to the structure of your codes and the order of the elements. Your code needs to be readable by search engines--and for this to be good, there are rules to follow. For instance, in HTML5, semantic elements--like ‘article’ or ‘section’--help search engines understand the structure of the webpage. And then there’s everything related to accessibility--for example, screen readers for the blind. The second part is the content and structure of the site. If you have a website with two or three pages, you can’t rank high because there’s not a lot of content.

What’s the secret to ranking high on search engine result pages?

I would say the first thing is security, so a valid hypertext transfer protocol secure [HTTPS] certificate. Also mobile friendliness, and this means that the page speed is good. Then, of course, another important factor is authority. How long has your website existed? How many other websites are linked to your website? Backlinks are key, but the links need to be in articles that speak about the same thematic discussed on your website. Google looks at your social networks, and ranking is also dependent on your activity and reach. The advantage in Luxembourg is that not a lot of companies are doing SEO, so it’s not so difficult to rank high.

Google changes its algorithms often. How do experts keep up?

Yes, they change every week. In France, Germany or other countries, there are digital agencies that do just SEO. That doesn’t exist in Luxembourg. [Our focus is not] only SEO, but we try to follow some rules.

How effective are paid ads compared to organic SEO?

One thing is sure, if you pay for visits, you get more visits, and your website ranks a bit higher because it’s more visited and so it’s more popular. But it’s a healthy combination that is better.

How familiar are Luxembourg businesses with SEO?

In Luxembourg, a lot of [small] businesses work through word-of-mouth advertising, while bigger companies have an SEO strategy and know the game. The problem is that small businesses don’t need it, or they think they don’t need it, but it’s always good to be better ranked.

Is it better for small businesses to focus on building their brand before adopting an SEO strategy?

Good question. I would say you should do both. If you are a new business in Luxembourg and you have a lot of competition, you should build your SEO if you have the budget. Everyone goes to Google when they don’t know where to go… For small businesses, SEO is very expensive. It takes a lot of effort, analysis and time. You can’t make optimisations, and one week later, everything is fine. It’s an ongoing process.

For companies managing their own SEO with free online tools, what should they keep in mind?

If you want to go further, it’s difficult with these tools because, when it comes to site structure, content or landing pages, the tools can’t tell you what to do.

At what point do companies begin to see a return on their SEO investments?

In three months, you can see some small results, but normally six months is a realistic [average]. What businesses shouldn’t forget is that one optimisation doesn’t make everything fine. Then if there is a lot of competition in your line of business, you need to also monitor your competition and then optimise against them.