Germany is the one market where a missing legal page has a price attached.
Everywhere else in Europe a bad imprint or a leaky consent banner is a risk. In Germany it is an invoice, because competitors and associations can send a warning letter and recover their costs. That changes what you build first.
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What is actually different about selling into Germany
The specifics that change the build, not a list of countries I will work in.
The regulator
There is no single national one for private companies. Each of the sixteen states has its own authority, and the one that supervises you is the state where you are established. The federal BfDI covers public bodies and telecoms.
What the site must publish
Section 5 of the DDG, the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, which replaced the Telemediengesetz on 14 May 2024. A page still headed with section 5 TMG is citing a repealed law.
The cookie rule
Section 25 of the TDDDG, which was the TTDSG until it was renamed on the same day in May 2024. It implements Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive and asks for consent before anything non essential is read or stored.
Checkout
Euro, and a German buyer expects to pay on invoice or with Klarna far more often than a British or Dutch one. Card only checkouts underperform here.
What usually goes wrong on a German site
An Impressum citing a repealed statute
Angaben gemaess Paragraf 5 TMG, still at the top of the page, more than a year after the TMG stopped existing. It is a small error that signals exactly how old the rest of the compliance work is.
Consent that fires before the click
A banner that looks correct and loads analytics, maps and fonts anyway while it is still on screen. This is the single most common real breach and the easiest one to prove from outside.
English pages aimed at German buyers
A site translated loosely from English, or not at all, competing for searches that happen in German. The language is not a presentation choice here, it is the whole search market.
Google Fonts loaded from Google
A stylesheet call that hands a German visitor's IP address to a third country before consent. It takes an hour to self host and it has been litigated.
Not sure which of those it is? Send the web address and the written 15 point check says so in two working days, free.
What the work actually is
The same list whether you are in Germany or anywhere else I work.
The 15 point technical check
Speed, indexing, structured data, redirects, consent and the rest, written out in the order worth fixing rather than the order a crawler found them.
Pages for what buyers search
Built from real search data in the language your buyers type, not translated from an English page and hoped over.
A redirect map before anything moves
Every old address mapped to a new one and tested before launch, because this is the step that loses rankings when it is skipped.
Tracking that waits for consent
Nothing loads before a choice is made, and the banner says what it does. This is the part regulators are actually acting on.
Google Ads on a flat fee
A fixed monthly amount whatever the spend, so the advice does not get more expensive when the budget does.
Shopify and WooCommerce moves
Products, variants, media and URLs moved with the search positions held, on the same domain where that is possible.
Custom systems when software is the problem
Order flows, stock feeds and internal tools, when the honest answer is that no amount of marketing fixes the process underneath.
Plain monthly notes
What was done, what it changed and what is next, in a page you can read without a glossary.
Want the number first? Every price is published, including the ones I would not charge you.
Why the legal furniture comes first in Germany and nowhere else
German competition law lets a competitor or an association object to a breach of statutory information duties and recover the cost of saying so. That created a warning letter industry, and although it was curtailed in 2020 it did not disappear. Section 13(4) number 1 of the UWG removed the cost recovery right from competitors for breaches of statutory information and labelling duties, which covers a faulty Impressum. Associations, consumer bodies and chambers still claim under the other provisions and their costs are still recoverable.
The practical reading is that the exposure went down and did not go away, and that ignoring a letter can still put you in front of a court over something that takes ten minutes to fix. So on a German site the imprint, the privacy policy and the consent gate get built properly on day one rather than added after the launch. The full analysis, including which country's list binds a foreign supplier, is in the imprint guide, and there is a German version at Impressumspflicht.
Sixteen regulators, which means local answers differ
Germany has no single data protection authority for private companies. The supervisory authority is the one for the state where you are established, and the state authorities have historically taken visibly different lines on the same question. That is why two German lawyers can give you opposite answers about the same analytics setup and both be describing their own state's published position accurately.
What survives that variation is the part none of them disagree about: nothing non essential may be read from or written to a visitor's device before consent, and the banner has to make refusing as easy as accepting. Build to that and the state level differences stop mattering for an ordinary business site. The detail of how the analytics question resolves, and where the German reading parts company with the British one, is in the guide to GDPR and analytics.
German pages, written in German
Search in Germany happens in German, including by people whose English is excellent. A German buyer researching a supplier types a German phrase, and a page that exists only in English is not competing for that phrase at all. Machine translating an English page gets you into the index and no further, because the phrasing is not what anybody actually searches.
There are German pages on this site you can judge the standard against before you commit to anything: SEO Berater, Website erstellen lassen and Was kostet eine Website. Read them and decide whether they sound like a person or like a translation.
A furniture retailer: three storefronts, three ad accounts and a CRM
A Dutch furniture retailer with three brands and a ten to twelve week order cycle, where the online numbers alone made a busy business look like a failing one until the measurement was fixed.
What I will not do
Said before you ask, because it is usually the deciding part.
Promise a position
Nobody controls Google's results, and anyone who promises a ranking is either guessing or lying. I will tell you what is winnable and what is not, with the search data in front of you.
Hold your accounts
Analytics, Search Console and every ad account are registered in your name from day one. If you stop working with me you lose nothing but me.
Bill a percentage of ad spend
A percentage pays me more when you spend more, which is the wrong incentive. Advertising is a flat monthly fee whatever the budget.
Take the work if it is the wrong spend
If the free check says your problem is not a website problem, the report says so and I tell you what would actually move the number.
Rather just ask? One question by email or WhatsApp is fine.
The rest of DACH
Neighbouring markets, each with its own regulator, language and checkout.
Every market I work in is listed on where I work, with what differs in each one.
Fair questions before you get in touch
You are not based here. Does that matter?
It has not so far. Everything runs by email and WhatsApp, the accounts are in your name, and the work is the same work wherever it is typed. I am in Pakistan and I say so on every page, because finding that out later is worse than reading it now.
Our Impressum still says Paragraf 5 TMG. Is that actually a problem?
The required details did not change when the law was renamed, so the content is probably fine. Citing a statute that no longer exists is the kind of thing a warning letter is built on, and correcting it is a five minute edit. Do it.
Do we need a German company to sell into Germany?
No. Where you are established decides which information list you publish, and the working analysis is that a foreign site competing for German customers can be held to the German list anyway, because German courts treat the provider information duty as a rule of market conduct. Publishing the German details is the safe answer and it costs nothing.
Can you write the German pages, or do we supply the copy?
I write them, from real German search data, and you review before anything goes live. If you would rather supply the copy that is fine too, and I will tell you where it is competing for a phrase nobody types.
Why are the prices on the website?
Because the alternative is a quote form, and a quote form exists to get you on a call before you know the number. The free 15 point check, the 290 euro audit and the monthly and rebuild prices are all published. You can decide before you ever write to me.
How long before any of this shows up in search?
A new page on a site that already carries some authority can move within weeks. On a site with very few links pointing at it, expect months, and expect the first movement on specific questions rather than on the obvious commercial terms. I will not give you a date, because nobody controls the result. What I will give you is the order of the work and what each step is meant to change.
Send your web address. That is the whole first step.
The written 15 point check comes back within two working days, free. It says what is holding the site back, in the order worth fixing.