SEO Consultant
Lyon

SEO in Lyon: a market you don’t win by volume

Lyon is France’s second-largest urban economy, and its SEO market reflects it: generalist agencies, web studios offering SEO as an add-on, freelancers, and more recently low-cost automated offers. For a Lyon business that wants to rank, the problem is not finding a provider — it is telling apart the one who will move your revenue from the one who will send you a monthly report.

For international companies and English-speaking teams, there is a second problem: most of that market works only in French. You end up either translating every exchange, or working with an English-speaking agency that does not know how French customers actually search.

In practice, on the searches that bring in revenue in Lyon, the first page is already held by established players with age and links. You don’t overtake them by publishing more pages. You overtake them by working on the three things they often neglect: technical soundness, the real intent behind the search, and authority earned link by link.

My roots in Lyon

I studied in Lyon — a Master’s degree at Ynov Lyon, after a bachelor’s degree in e-business. Since 2022, I have been an SEO and Google Ads consultant at DIOQA, in Rillieux-la-Pape, where I run acquisition on three levers: SEO, Google Ads and Meta Ads, connected to GA4 and Tag Manager tracking.

What that role has given me, and what I bring to my clients:

• +150% SEO growth on the scope I am responsible for;
• more than 50 backlinks earned on domains with real authority (DR/DA 40+), through outreach and negotiation, not bulk buying;
• more than 20 client websites managed in parallel, which requires repeatable methods rather than improvisation;
• unified SEO + paid reporting: every channel measured against its cost and its results.

On top of that come 22 certifications from Google, Semrush and HubSpot — twelve from Google alone, including Search Ads 360, Performance Max, Shopping and Analytics GA4. A certification does not make a good SEO, but it guarantees that we speak the same language as the tools we use.

What “local SEO” means in Lyon, in practice

Lyon is not a uniform city from a search point of view. A tradesperson in the 8th arrondissement, a consulting firm at Part-Dieu and a shop in Croix-Rousse do not compete for the same searches, and certainly not over the same radius. Google decides by combining proximity, the business’s prominence and the relevance of the page — and proximity is not something you choose.

What you can control:

Your Google Business Profile

It is the first local SEO lever, and the one most often underused: the wrong main category, no service area, photos never updated, reviews left unanswered. A well-maintained profile moves rankings in the local pack without touching the website.

Pages that match a real need

Creating one page per Lyon arrondissement is a false good idea: nine near-identical pages compete with each other and Google settles on none of them. One solid page per service works better, enriched with the local signals that matter — service area, references, real cases.

Authority

When content is on par, the link profile makes the difference. Local press, trade directories people actually use, partners, suppliers: the opportunities exist in Lyon, and they take outreach rather than budget.

Bilingual websites: where English versions usually fail

Many Lyon businesses with international customers have an English version of their website that never ranks. The cause is almost always structural: machine-translated pages, a single URL that switches language, missing hreflang tags, or English pages that simply copy the French keywords. Each language needs its own URLs, its own keyword research and its own titles — this is exactly the kind of work I do.

Freelancer or agency: the real difference

A Lyon agency sells you a team. In practice, your account is often handed to the most junior profile, and you pay for the structure as much as for the work. With a freelancer, the person who runs the audit is the one who writes the recommendations and the one who applies them. There is nobody to dilute responsibility if rankings don’t move.

The trade-off, honestly: I cannot take on ten projects at once, and I don’t take a project if I don’t see real room for progress. I have already concluded an audit with “your website is fine, the problem is elsewhere” — it is a useful answer, even if it doesn’t lead to a contract.

Beyond SEO

SEO takes several months to produce results. When you need volume right away, Google Ads takes over while organic traffic builds up — exactly the combination I manage every day at DIOQA. And for visibility in AI assistants’ answers, a recent but already measurable field, see GEO on the homepage.

I work in Lyon and across the metropolitan area — Villeurbanne, Bron, Vénissieux, Caluire-et-Cuire, Saint-Priest — as well as with businesses in Geneva, and in the Jura, where I am from. The first conversation is about looking at your website and your real position: if I have nothing useful to offer, I will tell you then.