Three profiles I work with in Douai
The SEO of a bakery on the Place d'Armes and that of a machining workshop have almost nothing in common. Here are the three cases I meet most often here, and what matters for each.
Tradespeople and local shops
Roofer, plumber, hairdresser, restaurant. Searches are numerous, immediate, and often made from a phone a few streets away from you. It is almost pure local SEO: everything comes down to the Google Business Profile listing, Google reviews and a website fast enough not to put off the person checking your prices.
SMEs selling to other businesses
Machining, metalwork, maintenance, logistics, engineering firms. Few searches, keywords that look nothing like consumer queries, and buyers who compare at length. It is the profile least well served by classic SEO, and the one with the most to gain.
Independent professionals and firms
Lawyer, chartered accountant, physiotherapist, real estate agency. Here the challenge is trust: people choose based on what they read before calling. Content counts as much as the position in search engines, and both are built together.
Selling to businesses changes everything
Douai and its surroundings have a lot of industry, and the arrival of the battery factories has mechanically grown the subcontracting network around them. For these businesses, SEO follows different rules from retail, and the usual advice often misses the mark.
- Volume means nothing. A specific manufacturing process may generate only a few dozen searches a month. That is little, but it is qualified traffic in the most literal sense: if one of those searches brings in a client company, the page pays for itself for several years.
- The vocabulary is the trade's own. A buyer's keywords are a standard, a material, a tolerance, a process. Writing “we produce quality parts” matches none of those searches.
- The cycle is long. People find you, leave, and come back three weeks later. The site has to give them something to compare and something to reassure them: references, certifications, production capacity, lead times.
- The decision is collective. The person who finds you is almost never the one who signs. Your pages have to stand on their own when they are passed around internally to someone who does not know you.
The work then consists of building one page per process, per material or per sector served, with real technical information. It is more demanding to write than a blog article, and far more effective. What remains is deciding which ones to write first, which is settled using a survey of the keywords actually typed in your sector rather than a manager's intuition.
Local SEO also works in B2B
A stubborn misconception holds that local SEO only concerns shops. In reality, a purchasing manager looking for a nearby provider goes through the local pack like everyone else, and an industrial business without an up-to-date listing disappears from that search, along with a good part of its local visibility.
In Douai, there is also a competitive angle: many providers based in Lille position themselves on local queries without having any presence here. A complete Google Business Profile listing and recent Google reviews remain the most direct way to show that you, on the other hand, are actually here. In a market of this size, it pays off faster and costs less than any link building strategy.
Two settings do most of the work and can be set up in a morning: choosing the primary category as close as possible to your real activity, and listing your services one by one instead of leaving that section empty. The rest, reviews above all, is built over time.
What to budget
The number of URLs to crawl sets the price of the audit. The rest is à la carte.
Audit and implementation
| Site size | Audit only, all taxes included | Audit + fixes applied, all taxes included |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 50 pages shop, tradesperson, firm, showcase site | €690 | €1,290 |
| 50 to 300 pages industrial SME with technical pages | from €1,190 | from €1,890 |
| 300 to 1,500 pages product reference catalog, multiple activities | from €1,990 | on quote |
| Larger, multilingual or multi-site | on quote | on quote |
Content and follow-up
| Technical page written one process, one material or one sector served | €245 |
|---|---|
| Quarterly follow-up | €290 / quarter |
| Consulting session, 2 hours minimum | €60 / hour |
Prices include all taxes; VAT does not apply (article 293 B of the French General Tax Code).
Monthly support and blog articles are listed in the general price list.
What local businesses ask me
My trade only generates a few searches a month. Is it worth it?
It all depends on what a customer is worth to you. Thirty monthly searches for a €200 service will never weigh on your revenue. The same thirty searches for a €40,000 service change the calculation completely.
That is the first thing I look at before proposing anything, and I sometimes advise doing nothing. A quote for a service that will never pay for itself interests me no more than it interests you.
I sell to businesses. Does SEO really help?
Yes, and often better than for consumers, because competition on technical queries is weak. Many manufacturers have a three-page showcase website written eight years ago, never touched since, that ranks for nothing.
The difference is that we do not aim for volume. We build a few precise pages about what you know how to do, and accept that they bring few visitors, but the right ones.
Does an industrial subcontractor need a blog?
Rarely in that form. Company news articles interest nobody and rank for nothing.
What works is permanent pages: one per process, per material worked, per type of part or per sector served. They read like documentation, they age well, and they answer exactly what a buyer types.
My site is ten years old. Should it be rebuilt?
Not necessarily. An old site that loads properly and displays on mobile can serve perfectly well as a base: in that case the optimization comes down to adding pages and fixing the structure, which costs much less than a redesign.
A redesign becomes necessary when the site cannot be read on a phone, when you can no longer add a page without calling someone, or when the technology keeps Google from reading the content. The audit decides, and it decides before we talk budget. You can also do a first check yourself: the points to verify fit in a single list, and they are often enough to see which way things lean.
Do you work with tradespeople?
Yes, and that is often where results come fastest, because the starting point is low and competitors are not doing much either.
For this profile I almost always start with local SEO, the listing and the reviews, before touching the site. It is cheaper, faster, and it shows whether the next investment is justified.
Can we meet before deciding?
Gladly. I am fifteen kilometers away, so a first meeting at your premises is no problem and costs nothing.
I come with a first look at your site and your listing, which makes the conversation more concrete than a phone call. You will see right away whether there is something to do or not.