Local SEO for contractors in Belgium: why your location page matters more than your homepage
We counted the Google results for roofer Sint Niklaas, electrician Beveren and painter Lokeren: 19 out of 29 were a location page and only 4 a homepage. Here is how to build one that brings in enquiries, what it costs and when to leave it.
You run a roofing business in Beveren, you have worked the area for fifteen years and your website looks the part. Yet something odd happens when you type roofer beveren into Google. You see a company from the far side of Antwerp, three directories with a hundred names in them and a Facebook page. Your own site sits somewhere on page two, or nowhere at all.
The strange thing is that your homepage says everything there is to say: what you do, where you work, how to reach you. And that is exactly where the problem sits, although hardly anyone has ever explained it to you. For this article we checked it result by result on three real searches in the Waasland region, and the outcome was even clearer than we expected. If you are after local SEO for contractors in Belgium, this is the one thing that changes your results.
The short version
This is the whole article in one table. Counted on 14 October 2026 in Google Belgium, regular results below the map only, for roofer Sint Niklaas, electrician Beveren and painter Lokeren.
| What we counted | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Results counted | 29 results |
| Location pages (town name in the URL) | 19 out of 29 |
| Homepages of a tradesperson | 4 out of 29 |
| Facebook, job listings and other | 6 out of 29 |
| Location pages built by a directory | 14 |
| Location pages built by a tradesperson | 5 |
| First impressions | 3 to 6 weeks |
| Stable on page one | 3 to 6 months |
| Cost with us | one off from €349, Local from €249 a month, Regional from €449 a month |
Prices, timelines and counts in this article are our own, as of October 2026.
What is local SEO, and why does it work differently for a contractor?
Local SEO is everything that makes you show up when someone types your service with a place name after it, or with near me. Google then shows two things: the map with three businesses at the top, and the regular results underneath. The map is fed by your Google Business Profile, and we have already covered which fields make the difference there. This article is about the part underneath, because that is where most contractors in the Waasland region lose customers without noticing.
For a shop, local SEO is simple: the customer comes to you, so the town you are in is the town that counts. For a contractor it is different. You go to the customer, and that customer searches with their own town, not yours. A roofer from Stekene gets their work from Sint Niklaas, Lokeren, Beveren and Sint Gillis Waas. Those are four different searches, and Google treats them as four different questions.
The numbers make it concrete. Roofer Sint Niklaas is typed about 320 times a month, roofer Stekene 70 times. A website whose homepage talks about Stekene competes for those 70 and lets the 320 pass by. Not because the roofer does not work there, but because the site never says so in a way Google can use.
Why is your homepage not at the top for roofer Sint Niklaas?
Because Google does not rank websites, it ranks pages. For every search, Google looks for the page that best matches that one question. A homepage is about everything you do and every place you work, and therefore about nothing in particular. A page called Roofer in Sint Niklaas is about one thing. That page wins, almost every time.
We counted it. For each of the three searches we took the regular results on page one and looked at the URL: does it contain the town name, is it a homepage, or is it something else?
| Search | Location pages | Homepages | Facebook and other |
|---|---|---|---|
| roofer Sint Niklaas | 7 | 2 | 1 |
| electrician Beveren | 6 | 1 | 2 |
| painter Lokeren | 6 | 1 | 3 |
| Combined | 19 | 4 | 6 |
19 out of 29 results for a local search in the Waasland region are a location page. Only 4 are the homepage of a tradesperson.
The second number matters even more than the first. Of those 19 location pages, 14 were built by a directory: Gouden Gids, Offertesonline, Trustlocal, Bativox, the roofer directory, the painter directory. Those sites understood years ago what most tradespeople still do not do: a separate page per trade per town. Only 5 of the 19 come from a business itself. For painter Lokeren they are Pyck and Albert Group, each with their own page about Lokeren. For electrician Beveren they are Wattra, with a regional page for Beveren, Kruibeke and Zwijndrecht, and the branch page of Rexel. For roofer Sint Niklaas it is Dakrubbercentrale, a company from beyond the Antwerp ring road, with a page simply called Roofing Sint Niklaas.
So the directories are not there because they are so good. They are there because the spots are empty. Every contractor in Sint Niklaas without a location page of their own leaves a spot to a directory that lists their name among a hundred others and hangs an enquiry form next to it. That form then goes to five competitors at once.
Two details from the count say a lot. For electrician Beveren, page one contained a directory page for Beveren aan de IJzer, a village in West Flanders on the other side of the country. Google clearly had too few real pages about Beveren in the Waasland region to choose from. And on that same search, an AI Overview already sat above all the results. If you want to appear in there, you need exactly the same location page, because AI systems pull their answers from pages that fully answer one question.
What is a location page, and what is it not?
A location page is a fully fledged page on your website about one service in one town where you actually work. The URL says it already: roofer sint niklaas, electrician beveren or painter lokeren, each as its own address after your domain name. The page has its own title, its own text, its own photos of work in that town and its own reviews from customers who live there. It is the page you would want to read yourself if you lived in Sint Niklaas and needed a roofer.
What it is not: a copy of your service page with only the place name swapped. Google calls those doorway pages and lists them in its spam policies next to bought links and hidden text. It is also not a list of forty towns in your footer, and not a page for a town where you have never set up a ladder. We often see that last one with businesses in a hurry: twenty pages in one week, all equally empty. Google notices, and more importantly, so does the customer.
A location page is worth it when
- you have worked there at least a few times in the past twelve months and you are happy to go back
- people actually search there: the search volumes further down give you the order
- you have proof that you work there: photos, a review, a street or neighbourhood you can name
- you are prepared to write at least 400 words of original text about it, not a copy
How does Google decide who ranks first for a local search?
For the map, Google itself names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile and your page match what is typed. Distance is how far you are from the place in the search, or from the searcher. Prominence is how often your name turns up elsewhere: reviews, mentions, links from other sites.
For the results below the map the same logic applies, except Google reads it from your pages instead of your profile. Relevance comes from a page that is literally about that service in that town. Distance comes from your address, your service area and the places you mention in your text and reviews. Prominence comes from links and mentions, for instance from a supplier, a local club or a customer who shows your work on their own site.
A location page tackles the first factor completely and helps with the other two. That is why it carries so much weight: without a page, Google simply has nothing to hold on to for relevance. Add structured data to that page, the LocalBusiness markup that Google describes in its documentation, and Google knows who you are and where you are without guessing.
Which towns deserve their own page?
Not all of them. We apply three rules: you really work there and want more work there, people search there, and you can prove it. The second rule can be measured. These are the average monthly search volumes in Google for two trades in the Waasland region, according to Google Ads data, as of October 2026.
| Search | Searches per month | What a click costs via Google Ads |
|---|---|---|
| roofer Sint Niklaas | 320 | €5.52 |
| roofer Lokeren | 170 | €5.77 |
| roofer Temse | 90 | €3.32 |
| roofer Waasland | 90 | €4.38 |
| roofer Stekene | 70 | €3.15 |
| roofer Beveren | 40 | €4.48 |
| roofer Sint Gillis Waas | 40 | €5.76 |
| electrician Sint Niklaas | 260 | €4.48 |
| electrician Lokeren | 140 | €8.44 |
| electrician Beveren | 70 | €7.54 |
Three things stand out. Sint Niklaas is the biggest search in the region for both trades, often twice the size of the runner up. The regional term roofer Waasland is a useful extra at 90 searches, but no substitute for the towns themselves. And a click via Google Ads in Sint Niklaas quickly costs more than five euros, which tells you what a location page is worth when it brings in free clicks every month.
Our order for a contractor in the Waasland region is almost always the same: Sint Niklaas first, then Lokeren or Beveren depending on where you are based, then your own town, then Temse and Sint Gillis Waas. Three to five pages in the first six months. Kruibeke, Waasmunster, Moerbeke and Zwijndrecht come later, once the first batch is up and you can see which ones work.
What needs to be on a location page for it to work?
The mistake we see most often is a page of four sentences with the town name in it. That is not a location page, that is an excuse. A page that works answers the question of someone from that town completely, so they no longer need to search further. These are the building blocks we put on every location page.
A title and a heading with the service and the town
Roofer in Sint Niklaas, not Welcome to Janssens Roofing. The page title is the first thing Google reads and the first thing the searcher sees in the results. Put the service in it, the town, and one reason to click: a timeframe, a starting price, or the number of years you have worked there.
A first paragraph that says where you come from and how fast you get there
From Stekene we are in Sint Niklaas in fifteen minutes, and for a leak we come the same day. That is the sentence that reassures a customer and gives Google the distance it is looking for. Name your own town, name the town of the page, and name the drive time between them.
Work from that town, with the neighbourhood named
A roof renovation in Nieuwkerken, a flat roof in Belsele, a gutter on the Tereken. Districts and neighbourhoods are gold, because they prove you have really been there and they catch searches nobody else serves. Three photos with a short caption are enough. No stock photos, because the customer from Sint Niklaas spots those straight away.
Reviews from customers in that town
Your Google Business Profile may have thirty reviews, but the page about Lokeren should carry the reviews from customers in Lokeren. After every finished job, ask the customer explicitly to mention their town in the review. That one line, great work on our roof in Lokeren, does more than ten generic reviews.
What is typical for that town
The centre of Sint Niklaas has lots of terraced houses with flat roofs and a narrow side passage, while Sinaai and Belsele have detached houses with pitched roofs and room for a crane. A roofer who writes that proves they know the area. That is the content a directory can never produce, and that is exactly why you win.
A price indication and the next step
Anyone looking for a roofer wants to know roughly what it costs. A starting price or a range per type of job removes the barrier. Put your phone number and a short quote button right next to it, at the top and at the bottom of the page. People who call usually call within the first ten seconds.
Links to and from the page
A location page that hangs off nothing is found slowly by Google and never by the visitor. Put it in the menu under Service area, link to it from your service pages, and link from the location page back to the services. That is the order we call step eight in our nine steps to rank higher on Google, and it counts double for local pages.
How do you write six location pages without writing the same thing six times?
This is the question everyone gets stuck on. The service is the same, the method is the same, the prices are the same. So what actually differs? More than you think, if you build the page around the town instead of around yourself.
What differs on every page: the completed jobs and their neighbourhood, the reviews, the drive time from your base, the districts you name, the type of housing and the typical problems there, and the question and answer block at the bottom. What may stay the same: your method in three steps, your guarantee, your contact details. Our rule of thumb is that at least half the text must be about that town and not about you. If you do not reach that, you do not have a page yet, you have a template.
That is how we did it for Schatteman Elektriciteit from Stekene: a separate page for Stekene and Moerbeke, and in the text the towns where Kevin also works, Lokeren, Wachtebeke, De Klinge and Sint Gillis Waas. For Prisma Sign from Sint Pauwels every product got its own page with the towns in it, from Sint Gillis Waas and Sint Niklaas to Stekene, Beveren and Temse, so the site appears for searches with a place name. And for Dakwerken Daklo we built the site around the services Lorenzo earns his money with and around the towns where he wants to work: Stekene, Sint Niklaas, Lokeren, Beveren and Sint Gillis Waas. Today Daklo sits in the top 3 on Google Maps for roofer Stekene, with 4.9 on Google and 12 reviews, and grew from a side job into roughly €800,000 in annual turnover.
Do not write them all in one week. One finished page every two weeks delivers more after six months than twenty pages that were all half empty on day one.
How do your location page and your Google Business Profile work together?
Your profile decides whether you appear on the map, your location page decides whether you appear underneath it. Whoever has both shows up twice for the same search, and that is exactly what you want. In the profile you fill in your service area, the towns you drive to, and you keep the main address where you are actually based. Never create a separate profile with a PO box or a friend’s address in every town. Google removes those profiles, and sometimes your real one with them.
What does work: pointing to the right location page in the posts and services on your profile, and getting the town to appear in your reviews. That way Google reads the same story twice. Which fields in that profile really count is covered in our article on the eleven fields of your Google Business Profile.
A worked example: what does a location page deliver for a roofer in the Waasland region?
Take a roofer from Stekene who has six location pages built: Sint Niklaas, Lokeren, Temse, Stekene, Beveren and Sint Gillis Waas. Together that is 730 searches a month, on the term roofer plus town alone. Variants such as roof renovation Sint Niklaas or roofing Lokeren come on top, but we leave those out of the sum to be cautious.
Suppose that after six months three of the six pages sit in the top five, the three biggest: Sint Niklaas, Lokeren and Temse, together 580 searches. In our experience a page in the top five captures 6 to 10 percent of searches as a click. Take 8 percent and you arrive at roughly 46 visitors a month. If one in twenty of them asks for a quote, that is 2 to 3 enquiries a month from the regular results, on top of what comes in through the map. Those are assumptions, not promises, and we write them down so you can adjust them yourself.
| Scenario | Cost per month | Enquiries per month | Cost per enquiry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buying those same 46 clicks via Google Ads at €5.52 | €254, every month again | 2 to 3 | €85 to €127 |
| Six location pages through our Local package | from €249, cancel monthly | 2 to 3 after six months, then ongoing | drops every month the pages stay up |
| Dakwerken Daklo, real figures from the case | on average €300 in Google Ads alongside the SEO | around 20 | around €15 |
| Glenn Piessens Renovatie, real figures from the case | €150 in Google Ads alongside regional texts | 7 to 8 | around €20 |
The difference between the first two rows is the difference between renting and buying. Google Ads stops the day you stop paying. A location page stays up, and every month it stays up, the cost per enquiry falls. The two bottom rows show what happens when you combine both: Glenn Piessens gets 7 to 8 enquiries a month with regional texts and €150 in Google Ads a month, and sits at number one on Google Maps for bathroom renovation Veurne. If one of those enquiries turns into a roof renovation or a bathroom, a whole year of investment is paid back.
How long does it take for a location page to rank?
Longer than a week and shorter than a year. This is what we see after more than 160 websites when a location page is well built and linked from the menu and the service pages.
Sint Niklaas takes longer than Sint Gillis Waas, because there is more competition and the directories have been there for years. A site that has existed for a few years and has reviews moves faster than a brand new one. And a page nobody links to does not move at all. If you want the full order, from keywords to measuring, it is in the step by step plan for construction companies in the Waasland region with real timelines per action.
What does local SEO cost in the Waasland region?
You can do it yourself, and for the first page we even recommend it. Allow four to eight hours per page if you do it properly: checking keywords, collecting photos, asking for a review, writing, hanging the page in the menu. After that, keeping it up becomes the problem, not the knowledge. That is usually the moment business owners call us.
| Approach | Cost | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | €0, 4 to 8 hours per page | anyone who wants one or two towns and enjoys writing |
| One off SEO for your own town | from €349 | anyone who wants to rank in their own town and nothing more |
| SEO Local | from €249 a month | anyone who wants three to five towns in the Waasland region, with follow up |
| SEO Regional | from €449 a month | anyone who wants to go beyond the Waasland region alone |
The monthly packages can be cancelled monthly, have no setup costs, and we always start with a free audit so you know where you stand before you pay anything. What you pay elsewhere and why prices vary so much is in our article on how much SEO costs in Belgium. If you are unsure whether you can do it yourself, our piece on outsourcing SEO or doing it yourself is more honest than a sales call. Everything we do in local SEO is on the page of our SEO agency in the Waasland region.
Our own figures: what do Offlow’s location pages do?
We do not just preach this, we measure it on ourselves. These are the Google impressions for our homepage and for our five location pages over the last 90 days, as of October 2026.
Five location pages gather 11,557 impressions between them, almost as many as our homepage. That is the good news, and the proof that a page per town shows up where a homepage never will. The bad news is honest: those pages sit between position 17 and position 60 on average, and so they earn few clicks. They exist, but they are not finished. Too little of our own work from those cities, too few reviews that name the city, too few links. Exactly the items on the checklist above. We are finishing them one by one this autumn, and we will post the figures here again once they move.
A page that exists gets impressions. A page that is finished gets clicks. The difference is proof: photos, reviews and links from that town.
What can you do yourself this week?
- Type your service plus your three most important towns into Google and note, per search, how many results are a location page and whether you are among them.
- Pick one town where you would like more work and where you have already done at least three jobs. Not your own town, but the biggest one next to it.
- Collect three photos of work in that town and write the neighbourhood or district next to each photo.
- Call two customers from that town and ask for a Google review in which they mention their town.
- Write the page: title with service and town, first paragraph with your drive time, the three jobs, the two reviews, what is typical about the houses there, a starting price, your phone number at the top and bottom.
- Hang the page in your menu under Service area and link to it from your service page.
- Add the town to the service area in your Google Business Profile if it is not there yet.
- Note your position for that search today and set a reminder for six weeks from now to check again.
The mistakes we see most often
Every town in one sentence on the homepage
We work in Sint Niklaas, Beveren, Lokeren, Temse, Stekene, Sint Gillis Waas, Kruibeke and Waasmunster. That sentence sits on thousands of sites and delivers nothing on any search. Google cannot turn it into a page for Lokeren, and the customer from Lokeren does not feel spoken to.
Ten pages with only the place name swapped
The opposite of the first mistake, and just as useless. Google recognises the same text with a different place name, picks one and ignores the rest. In the worst case it treats the whole series as spam and your homepage sinks with it.
A location page that hangs off nothing
The page is live, but not in the menu, not in the footer, not in a service page. Google finds it after weeks or not at all, and anyone browsing the site never finds it. Every location page deserves at least two internal links.
Pages for towns where you do not work
A page about Antwerp because Antwerp is big. You have no photos there, no reviews, no story, and when an enquiry comes in you do not really want to drive there. The page does not rank, and if it ranks anyway, it brings work you do not want.
The wrong town because the name exists twice
Beveren exists twice, Sint Gillis exists twice, Berlare and Berlaar are one letter apart. Always add the province or the region on the page: Beveren in the Waasland region, Beveren Waas. In our count we saw a directory page for Beveren aan de IJzer on page one for a search from the Waasland region. That click is lost for everyone.
No phone number at the top
Someone who types roofer Sint Niklaas with a leak above their head does not read 800 words. They look for a number. If it only appears at the bottom, they call the directory above you, which does put it at the top. A location page without a phone number in the first screen is a page that blocks its own work.
When does a location page make no sense for you?
You only work in your own town and want to keep it that way. Then a properly completed Google Business Profile plus one homepage that clearly names your town is enough. A second page about the same town even works against you, because then your own pages compete with each other.
Your diary has been full for six months already. Then extra enquiries only bring extra times you have to say no, and that costs you reviews. Start with location pages only when you have room or want to grow.
You sell online and deliver across Belgium. A webshop does not need location pages but product pages that rank well, and that is a different story, which we cover separately under webshop development.
Your website is not technically sound. A site that takes eight seconds to load on a phone or is not secured will not earn a place on page one even with ten location pages. Have the basics checked first. That is what our SEO audit, which lists every issue on your site, is for.
You have no proof. No photos, no reviews, no work you are allowed to show. Then every location page becomes an empty page, and those do not beat the directories. Collect six months of proof first, then build.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is local SEO?
Local SEO is all the work that makes you appear when someone types your service with a place name or with near me, both in the map at the top of Google and in the regular results underneath. For a contractor it mainly means a good Google Business Profile and a separate page for every town where you work.
How many location pages do I need?
Three to five in the first six months, starting with the biggest town next to your own. For the Waasland region that is almost always Sint Niklaas, followed by Lokeren or Beveren. More pages only make sense once the first batch is finished and ranking.
Is a location page not a doorway page that Google penalises?
Not if it has real content about that town: your own work with the neighbourhood named, reviews from customers in that town, your drive time and what is typical about the houses there. Google penalises copies in which only the place name changes. At least half the text must be about the town, not about you.
Do I need a page for every district of Sint Niklaas?
No. Build one page for Sint Niklaas and name Belsele, Nieuwkerken and Sinaai on it with one completed job per district. That way you catch the searches for the districts without building empty pages.
Can I do local SEO myself or do I need a local SEO specialist?
You can build the first location page yourself, allow four to eight hours. The keyword research, the technical side and keeping it up across six towns and six months is what most business owners outsource. With us that is a one off from €349 for your own town or from €249 a month for the Waasland region, cancel monthly.
Does a location page also work in ChatGPT and in Google’s AI Overviews?
Yes, and often better than a homepage. AI systems pull their answer from pages that fully answer one question, and a page about roofer in Sint Niklaas with drive time, prices and completed jobs is exactly such a page. For electrician Beveren our count already showed an AI Overview above the results.
Want to know which location page pays off first for you?
Request the free audit of your website. Within 24 hours you get a report with your position for your most important towns, the directories currently taking your spot, and the order in which we would build the pages. No setup costs, no obligation, and within two weeks you know what it would cost for you. Prefer to call straight away? Silvio is available on 0495 46 80 90.
Would you rather we took care of it?
Tell us briefly what your business does and what you need your website to bring in. Silvio reads every enquiry himself and replies by the next working day.
