Local SEO checklist for German-speaking Europe

Introduction

This is meant to be worked through rather than skimmed. The order matters, because each step depends on the one before it. Until the spelling of the company name is settled, creating directory listings is pointless, and until the profile is verified there is no performance data to measure against. One naming note: the product has not been called Google My Business since 2021. It is the Google Business Profile.

What Google documents, and what US checklists miss

Google's help page lists exactly three factors for local results. Relevance is how well a profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far the business is from the person searching; if they do not share their location, Google uses what it knows about it anyway. Prominence is how well known the business is, and Google names the number of websites linking to the business and the number of reviews as inputs.

That is the entire published list. The same page states that a better local ranking cannot be requested or bought and that the algorithm details stay confidential. Any checklist assigning percentages to these factors is inventing them, ours included if we did it.

The first diagnostic question on a new local project is which of the three is actually the constraint. A bakery that shows in the local pack on its own block and disappears three districts away does not have a profile problem. It has a distance problem, and no amount of photos, posts or category tuning will fix it. The local pack is the map block above the organic results, and its order shifts with the searcher's location, which is why a single measurement from the office desk says almost nothing.

Imported checklists also assume US directories, one language per country, one spelling system, and a legal environment where removing a review is close to impossible. All four assumptions break here.

Step 1: Lock down the NAP line

NAP stands for name, address, phone. The point is not that these three exist somewhere. The point is that they are identical everywhere. Write the canonical version down once, on one page, with a date.

• Company name exactly as it appears on the sign at the building, on invoices, and in the commercial register (Handelsregister, Firmenbuch or Registro Imprese).
• Street, number, postcode and town in one fixed form, abbreviations included. Either "Straße" or "Str.", not both.
• Phone number in international format with the country code: +49, +43, +41, +39. One number that rings at the location and is managed by the business directly. Google prohibits redirect numbers, advises against call centre lines, and rules out premium-rate numbers entirely, which in Germany covers the common 0180 service lines.
• A rule for umlauts and ß, below.
• A list of every system holding this data. For a small business it is usually about a dozen.

The umlaut rule

Sooner or later every business here hits a system that cannot store ä, ö, ü or ß. An old point-of-sale system, a trade portal with ASCII-only fields, a booking provider built in the US. Somebody improvises, and from that moment the company exists in two spellings.

Our rule has two parts. First, there is one primary spelling and it keeps the umlauts. "Bäckerei Grünwald" is the name; "Baeckerei Gruenwald" is not. Second, where a system cannot accept umlauts, define one transliteration policy and apply it consistently, for example ä to ae, ö to oe, ü to ue and ß to ss. "Gruenwald" is a readable transliteration. "Grunwald" is a different surname and creates a second entity.

The ß carries a country question with it. Switzerland does not use it and writes ss instead, so a chain with branches in Munich and Zurich has two correct spellings of "Bahnhofstraße". Canonical means per country, not per company. Google's chain rule fits exactly there: all locations within one country carry the same name, across borders they need not. In all caps the correct form is still SS rather than the capital ẞ, which databases handle inconsistently.

Where the spelling has to match

• Google Business Profile
• The website imprint (Impressum, legally required in Germany and Austria)
• Commercial register entry
• Invoices and letterhead
• Structured data on the website
• Every directory listing from step 3
• Social profiles

Two naming traps catch companies here more than anywhere else. Google lists legal suffixes such as GmbH, GmbH & Co. KG and OHG as content that does not belong in the profile name; keeping one requires proof through signage, business cards or invoices. Words in all capitals are not allowed either, with "SUBWAY" against "Subway" as the documented example. A brand set in caps on the letterhead still goes into the profile in normal case.

Step 2: Clean up the Business Profile

• Verify the profile. Without verification there is no performance data, and the business is less likely to appear in results.
• Name exactly as fixed in step 1. No town, no service, no keyword. Google's examples of disallowed names cover marketing slogans, phone numbers, opening hours, location descriptors and notes about where in a building you are.
• Categories by Google's IS rule: pick what completes "this business IS …", not "this business HAS …". As few as possible, as specific as possible. Pick "golf resort" and Google derives the broader categories itself.
• Address or service area, cleanly separated. A rented mailbox or virtual office is not allowed; a coworking desk qualifies only if it is signposted, staffed during opening hours and receives customers. If you work at the customer's site and run the business from home, remove the address and set a service area. Google gives roughly two hours' drive as guidance.
• Permanent year-round signage carrying the business name at that address. It is in the guidelines and seasonal businesses routinely miss it.
• Opening hours including holidays. For seasonal operations Google prescribes a clear route: regular hours for the season you are open, the "temporarily closed" status in the off season, then regular hours again on reopening. Hotels and other accommodation enter no opening hours at all, since Google lists them among the types that should leave the field empty. In the Alps it is filled in anyway, profile after profile.
• Description without links, prices or promotions. All three are prohibited.
• Photos that show the actual place. A picture of the entrance with the signage on it beats a stock image.
• One profile per location. Departments with their own customer entrance get their own profile, which has to differ from the main business in both name and category.
• For doctors, lawyers and estate agents: one profile per practitioner who deals with customers. Titles such as Dr. med. or Prof. may appear in the name. Employees without their own client base get none.

Step 3: Directories that matter in German-speaking markets

We build this list from the search results rather than a template, which takes twenty minutes: search the company name plus town, then the trade plus town, and write down every directory on pages one and two. The result is short, regional, and the only list worth maintaining.

What tends to appear: Das Telefonbuch, Das Örtliche, Gelbe Seiten, 11880, meinestadt.de, Yelp Germany, and wlw for B2B. In Austria HEROLD, firmenabc and the Chamber of Commerce company index. In Switzerland local.ch, search.ch and the central company index Zefix. In Italy, and therefore South Tyrol, PagineGialle, the Registro Imprese and the Bolzano Chamber of Commerce directories. On top of that, trade portals which in some industries matter more than every general directory combined.

We do not do bulk submission. Every additional listing is one more place where the spelling can drift, and a link from a directory nobody uses is what Google's spam policies describe as link spam.

• List built from search results, not from a template
• Every listing checked against the NAP page
• Old listings with dead phone numbers or a previous address corrected or deleted
• Login details documented so the check is repeatable
• Quarterly review scheduled

The most common find in this exercise is not a missing listing. It is a ten-year-old listing carrying the address from before the move.

Step 4: Website, location pages, structured data

• One page per location, with address, hours, directions and content that only applies to that location. The same page with the town name swapped is what Google's spam policies call a doorway.
• LocalBusiness markup on the location page. Google requires name and address, and recommends geo with at least five decimal places, openingHoursSpecification, telephone including country and area code, url, and priceRange under 100 characters.
• Use the most specific subtype, so Restaurant, DaySpa or HealthClub rather than plain LocalBusiness. Multiple types go in an array, not through additionalType.
• Leave out aggregateRating and review. Google recommends those two properties only for sites that capture reviews about other businesses. Marking up your own Google stars on your own page is not that.
• Validate with the Rich Results Test and fix the critical errors.
• On bilingual sites, hreflang on every language version, linked in both directions. Google names missing return links as the most common hreflang mistake.

The markup side is covered separately, in a piece on how to mark up LocalBusiness data correctly. Page-level prerequisites sit under the technical groundwork on your own site.

Step 5: Reviews, and the German legal wrinkle

Google names reviews as part of prominence and says more reviews and positive ratings can improve local ranking. That is the whole documented claim.

Google's Maps content policy prohibits:

• Incentives of any kind: payment, discounts, free products or services. This includes offering something in exchange for editing or removing a negative review.
• Blocking negative reviews or selectively soliciting only satisfied customers.
• Urging customers to write a review while they are still on the premises.
• Requiring specific content, such as naming a particular staff member.
• Setting staff quotas for the number of reviews to solicit.

Exactly one thing is permitted: asking for contributions that reflect a real experience, without incentives and without steering what the review says. Our process follows from that: one request after the work is delivered, in the customer's language, through a short link, with no reminder sequence.

The German exception

Because of the volume of defamation removal requests in Germany, Google displays a notice on business profiles when reviews have been removed following a defamation complaint under German law. It shows a range rather than an exact figure, for example "11 to 20 reviews", counted over the last 365 days and excluding any reinstated on appeal. Google's explanation notes that German courts have set a low bar for businesses challenging reviews, and that the notice does not affect ranking.

So the legal route works, but it has a visible price. A business that removes every uncomfortable review ends up wearing a public label about it. Use it for reviews that are genuinely unlawful and for nothing else.

On replies: German-language readers expect a reply that settles a question, not one that thanks them for their feedback. State the facts, correct what is wrong, offer a way to continue elsewhere, and use the formal Sie even when the reviewer does not. Never confirm a patient or client relationship in a public reply. Have reply templates for healthcare and legal practices reviewed in advance by qualified local counsel.

Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol

The same pages work across all three markets. The data inside them does not.

Austria

Four-digit postcodes, +43 dialling code, and legal forms that differ from Germany, including OG, KG and e.U., all covered by the same Google rule on legal suffixes. Directories: HEROLD, firmenabc, the Chamber of Commerce.

The underrated issue is trade vocabulary. A German "Klempner" is an Austrian "Spengler", a "Fleischer" becomes a "Fleischhauer", a "Hausmeister" a "Hausbesorger". That affects the profile category, the service list and the headings. A page optimised for "Klempner Innsbruck" aims at a word people there do not type.

Switzerland

Four-digit postcodes, +41, no ß, prices in CHF, which also applies to priceRange in the markup. Directories: local.ch, search.ch, Zefix.

A business in Biel/Bienne needs a German and a French version as separate URLs with reciprocal hreflang, not one page carrying both. The vocabulary diverges precisely where local searches happen: "Coiffeur" rather than "Friseur", "Garage" rather than "Autowerkstatt", "Velo" rather than "Fahrrad". Reusing the German page unchanged means ranking for words nobody there enters.

South Tyrol

This is where we are based, and where the problem gets genuinely hard. South Tyrol is officially bilingual German and Italian, and trilingual with Ladin in two valleys. Street names exist in both versions, and many businesses carry a bilingual registered name. The Business Profile has one name field.

• The profile name is the name on the sign and in the Registro Imprese. If the registration carries both languages with a separator, that is the name, and it is documented if Google asks.
• The second language version belongs in structured data as alternateName and in the second language version of the site.
• Enter the address in whichever form the map service actually resolves. Test both before committing. Province code BZ, addressCountry is IT.
• Profile language follows the customers, not the management. The test is cheap: the performance report lists under "searches" the terms people used to find the business. With the language of your existing reviews alongside it, two months gives a clear picture. Bolzano reads differently from Brunico, and both differently from the Val Venosta.
• For the website, hreflang with de-IT and it-IT plus x-default, linked reciprocally. A country code on its own is invalid; the first component is always the language.
• Do not mix both languages on one page. Google determines page language algorithmically and uses neither hreflang nor the lang attribute for it, so a mixed page is ambiguous by construction.

Google supports only ISO 639-1 language codes for hreflang. Do not invent a code for a Ladin version. You can publish the page, but without an unsupported Ladin hreflang annotation.

How the same data behaves in generated answers is covered in our piece on how AI Overviews change the first page. If you want to know where your business stands against competitors in your catchment area, we offer a free review of your local visibility. The service itself: local SEO for businesses in German-speaking markets.