Winning local search city by city: the Doe Nederland story

Client

Doe Nederland

Market

Tourism

meet our Expert

Emma Smeulders

Team Lead SEO

Winning local search city by city: the Doe Nederland story

Executive summary

Doe Nederland helps people book days out, group activities and team outings, with sites for Den Bosch, Eindhoven and Nijmegen plus a national one. The demand was there, but in a crowded, seasonal market it was hard to know where to focus, and when people searched for something to do, they usually found a competitor first. So we stopped treating the four sites as separate projects and ran them as one connected engine, built around exactly what people in each city search for.

Today, Doe Nederland is the name they find first when they look for a day out in its cities, turning search into a steady source of new bookings.

Results

At the top of Google’s Dutch results in every city it serves, for the “things to do in Den Bosch / Eindhoven / Nijmegen” searches people make when planning a day out.
Bookings for the Bossche Bollen workshop doubled to 12,000+ a year, Doe Den Bosch’s signature experience and biggest organic draw.
Doe Eindhoven pulled more visitors from Google than ever before in 2025, and grew a further 30% in 2026.
Doe Den Bosch grew its visitors from Google ~3x over the campaign, and now ranks top-three for 500+ of its searches.
Across the four sites, 1,400+ searches rank in the top 3 of Google’s Dutch results, and 5,500+ on the first page.

Our approach

We treated Doe Nederland as one entity with four local sites. One shared topical map kept the sites from cannibalizing each other and built authority across the whole brand. Each individual city was researched in detail: analyzing local demand, creating and adjusting content to match it, and making site-specific technical improvements. In practice, four connected local SEO projects under one strategy.

Every city has something only it can offer. For Den Bosch, that is the Bossche Bol, and the make-your-own workshop built around it. We made Doe Den Bosch the default answer for it, with dedicated, optimized pages targeting the full search landscape, from Bossche Bollen workshop to workshop Bossche Bollen maken and the branded variants people actually type. It is now a top-three result across the core terms and one of the site’s biggest organic draws: a signature local product turned into a category we own.

Before writing anything, we mapped the full outing and experience search landscape for each city, then matched what each place actually offers to the audiences that book it. Corporate teams looking for team outings and team days, groups planning bachelor parties, families and school trips, students during introduction weeks: each segment got the pages and the local experiences that fit it.

We optimized priority pages across all four sites, with proper heading structure, internal links between related outings and meta titles built to earn the click, and resolved technical blockers such as canonical issues and mobile rendering on intros and headings, so the content we built could rank.

An ongoing link building program placed the city sites on relevant regional, family and lifestyle platforms, built around the topics each site needed to own rather than volume for its own sake.

We ran a CRO analysis pinpointing where mobile visitors dropped out and fed it into page priorities, and timed content to the calendar the business runs on, from school holidays and introduction weeks to the Christmas season, so each site captured its peaks.