Visibility basicsWhy it's easier to get found in Norway than in the Netherlands

About ten times less than Dutch. W3Techs measures continuously which language websites are written in.

On its own that says little: Norway is simply a small country. It gets interesting when you set it against the number of speakers.

Dutch has roughly 25 million speakers, Norwegian roughly 5.4 million. That's a ratio of about 4.6 to 1. But in web content the ratio is about 10 to 1. So Norwegian is roughly twice as underrepresented online as its speaker numbers explain.

Two caveats, because they matter. That 0.2% is a rounded figure, so the real ratio sits somewhere between eight and fourteen. And how many speakers a language has depends on whether you count Flanders and Suriname. Neither changes the direction; both change the exact factor.

Why this matters: search engines and AI answers draw on what exists. For a Norwegian question there are simply fewer sources to pick from. The same effort returns more in Norwegian than in Dutch, because you're competing with fewer others for the same spot.

Source: W3Techs, usage statistics of content languages.

This is the part you don't get out of a tool. The Netherlands and Norway look alike on paper, two prosperous northern European countries, but they buy differently.

Buying online is less established in Norway. In the Netherlands about 18.3% of total retail now happens online, above the European average of 14.7%. For Norway the estimates land at 10 to 15%. Those two figures don't come from the same measurement and so aren't exactly comparable, but the direction is clear and it matches what I see: the Norwegian market is growing online, yet the shop is still often where it ends.

In Norway I more often see a deliberate preference for something from their own country. A product made in Norway, or a service from a Norwegian supplier, gets preference sooner. I notice that more strongly than in the Netherlands. So a foreign supplier starts with a disadvantage that's easy to underestimate from a Dutch perspective. A Norwegian address, a Norwegian phone number, Norwegian text that doesn't read as translated and a visible Norwegian presence aren't details.

What I see in the Netherlands is comparison; in Norway the time goes into trust first. Dutch buyers put prices side by side and switch to somebody else easily. With Norwegian clients more time goes into whether you can be trusted. Once that's settled, things move faster.

In practice that means something concrete: in Norway getting found is more often the run-up to a shop visit or a phone call than to an order. Your Google Business Profile, your opening hours, your visibility in Maps and how reachable you are count for more there than a perfectly optimized product page. Copy a Dutch e-commerce approach into Norway unchanged and you're optimizing for the wrong outcome.

Sources: e-commerce statistics 2026 for the Netherlands and the European average, ECDB for Norway. The rest of this section is what I run into on assignments in both markets, not research.

Norwegian has two official written standards. For commercial text you pick Bokmål in practice, because that's what the great majority of Norwegians read and write. But there's a technical side to this that almost never gets discussed.

Språkrådet, the Norwegian Language Council, writes two things that bear on this directly. First, that multilingual datasets mostly don't distinguish between Bokmål and Nynorsk: "Dei fleirspråklege datasetta skil stort sett ikkje mellom bokmål og nynorsk." Second, that the language codes themselves get used carelessly: "Ver merksame på at språkkodane no, nb og nn ikkje vert brukte på ein konsekvent måte."

What you do with that: pick one code and use it consistently everywhere, in your lang attribute, in your hreflang and in your sitemap. For Bokmål that's nb. Don't alternate between no and nb across pages, because then a system has to guess what you mean, and guessing is exactly what you want to avoid when there's already little Norwegian material to compare you against.

What I'm not claiming here: that Nynorsk pages rank worse. It gets said, I couldn't find a source for it, and so I'm leaving it as an open question.

Decisions like this belong under marketing localization. It's rarely only about whether the words are right.

Source: Språkrådet on access to language data.

If you already work in the Netherlands and are considering Norway, this is the order I'd keep to.

• Don't translate your Dutch site. A translation that reads well still doesn't sell. The assumptions underneath differ: less buying online, more trust needed up front, a stronger preference for Norwegian.
• Make sure you're visible in Norway first. Business Profile, address, phone number, opening hours, reviews. In a market where the purchase often ends offline, that's not a side issue.
• Pick Bokmål and one language code, and keep it the same everywhere.
• Write about subjects that have no good Norwegian answer yet. Search your question in Norwegian and see what comes back. If it's thin, that's your opening.
• Check what you read. Click through to the source before you repeat a figure. In the Norwegian market, remarkably often that figure turns out to come from somebody selling you something.

Want the foundation in place first? That's in the online visibility basics, and the technical side I describe under SEO and AI visibility. Work across borders sits under marketing localization, because it's rarely only about language.