Things to consider when expanding to the Finnish market

Finland is a special country. First, they speak a unique language in Finland that you don’t see any other place in Europe or even the world. Secondly, they are part of the Nordic countries, so their mentality is closely related to the Scandinavian mind set. So, there is both something familiar and foreign about this country with a thousand lakes up north.

If you are a business owner and thinking about entering the Finnish market, then there are things to consider before you do so. Most of it is related to language and the way the Finnish search engine optimization and linkbuilding works. As said, Finnish is a language quite like no other and it might be difficult to translate the basic texts from English to Finnish.     

How does SEO and linkbuilding work?

First, you might want to ask yourself: What is SEO exactly? That is a good question. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique that companies and writers use on the internet to attract attention to a certain kind of product or message. This might be done by using certain kinds of expressions, keywords, bullet-points, headlines and even pictures.

All of these different techniques take the potential customer into account when they are using the search engine. If SEO works as planned, then the webpage containing information about the product will rank higher in the search results because the search engine will prioritize it. Nobody knows for sure how the algorithm works, but over the last 10 to 15 years experts have begun noticing certain patterns. And it’s worth it weight in gold.

While SEO is related to language, linkbuilding is more related to trust. If you have someone linking to your webpage, that is considered a sign of trust from that other site. This means that if you have several sites linking to your website, the search engine will start to notice this as well. It will consider this a sign of trustworthiness meaning your websites is worth looking up.

SEO in Finland

While linkbuilding is straightforward and rather uniform all over the world, it might be difficult to enter a foreign online market without understanding the language first. Since Finnish is rooted differently than other European languages it might not be as easy to translate 1 on 1. That’s why you might want SEO-experts guiding you through the maze so you can make a big impact from day one.

If you rank highly in the Finnish search results, you will most definitely get more clients. If you understand how Finnish people think and speak you already have an advantage. Remember, it’s all about meeting the needs of the clients before they even know they need it. If you already know what your potential clients are going to look for on the internet, what they type and write in the search bar, you can meet their needs by preparing a webpage that has taken all of that into account.