It’s been said that Great Britain leads Europe when it comes to link building, with MEC regarded by some as a centre of excellence when it comes to SEO.
On a recent visit to Belgium, my colleague and I Matt Bennett were given the opportunity to meet with the team at Outrider and MEC to discuss the subject of link building. I have to say it was an amazing experience and, on a personal level, an awesome country to see given my Flemish ancestry.
The offices are located in a town just outside Ghent which is in the Flemish-speaking north of the country. A rented building shared with quite a few tech start-ups, it houses a collection of servers which apparently host 10 per cent of Belgium’s internet.
What was covered?
From a link-building perspective, the team explained that they were only starting to experiment with other forms of link building, other than article submissions. This led to the majority of our sessions focusing on how best to approach other link-building channels and demonstrating what tools could be used to keep things efficient.
How does Belgium compare to the UK?
Belgium has a pretty complex structure, split into three official regions. There is Flanders in the north, Wallonia in the south and the capital Brussels. The main languages of the former are Flemish and French respectively, while the latter boasts one of a very few truly official multilingual cities in the world. To make things more complicated, if someone from Flanders can’t communicate with someone from Wallonia - or vice-versa - English tends to be the default language!
What really stood out?
As English speakers, we naturally take language for granted. It was quite unique to see people who work there not just communicating in Flemish amongst themselves, but having the ability to communicate with Matt and myself in English while speaking to a customer in French over the phone.
All this linguistic confusion means Belgium is very different to the UK in terms of how people search the web and how budgets are allocated for SEO. Population wise Belgium is one-fifth of the size of the UK (which of course has just one principal language). So when pricing an SEO campaign, all budgets need to be doubled to ensure the sites are optimised for both Flemish and French results.
General Feedback
Our sessions in Belgium seemed to go down really well and we’ve received some very positive feedback from the surveys we sent over on our return. It seems that everyone who attended found the sessions suitably interactive and took away something new to bring to their link building and would recommend to other European markets moving forward.