We build for businesses in Prague and across Europe, and there is one pattern we see again and again with companies entering the Czech market: they pour everything into Google and act as if Seznam does not exist. It is an understandable mistake. If you have done SEO anywhere else in the world, Google is the whole game. In Czechia, it is not.
Czechia is one of the very few countries on earth with a homegrown search engine that still matters. Seznam.cz launched in 1996, before Google existed, and it never went away. Google is the larger player today, but a meaningful slice of Czech searches still run through Seznam, and that slice skews toward exactly the people a local business often wants: older, more settled, more local, and more likely to be searching with intent rather than idle curiosity.
If you are ignoring it, you are ignoring a chunk of your market that your Czech competitors are quietly serving.
Seznam is not "a smaller Google"
The biggest error is treating Seznam as if it were Google with less traffic, so the same work should cover both. It does not quite work that way. Seznam is its own ecosystem with its own crawler, its own webmaster tools, its own ad network (Sklik), and its own business directory (Firmy.cz). It evaluates pages with its own logic, and that logic has historically rewarded slightly different things than Google does.
In broad strokes, Seznam tends to lean harder on clear on-page relevance and genuine Czech-language content, and it leans on its own properties, especially Firmy.cz, for local results. Google has spent two decades building extraordinarily sophisticated systems for understanding intent, language, and link quality. Seznam is less forgiving of vague, thin, or purely English content aimed at a Czech audience, and more rewarding of pages that are unambiguous about what they are, who they serve, and where.
The practical upshot is that a site built and optimised purely for Google, in English, with no presence on Seznam's own surfaces, can be close to invisible to a Czech searcher who starts on Seznam, even when it ranks perfectly well on Google.
The two things foreign businesses miss most
There are two gaps we see constantly, and both are unforced errors.
The first is Firmy.cz. For a huge share of local Czech searches, Firmy.cz is the discovery surface, in much the same way Google Business Profile drives the local pack on Google. If your business is not listed and verified there, you are absent from a primary way Czech customers find local providers. It is free, and most foreign entrants simply never set it up.
The second is real Czech content. Not translated content, Czech content. There is a difference, and Seznam is good at feeling it. A page that has been run through a translation tool reads as what it is, and it almost never matches the phrases Czech people actually type. Czechs do not search for the literal translation of your English keyword. They search the way Czechs search, with their own phrasing, their own compound terms, their own shorthand. Content written Czech-first, by someone who understands the market, lands in a completely different place than a translated mirror of your English site.
Optimising for both without doing everything twice
The good news is that you do not run two separate SEO operations. A genuinely well-built site, clean technically, fast, clearly structured, honest about what it is, is a strong foundation for both engines. The fundamentals overlap far more than they differ.
Where the work diverges is in the Czech-specific layer: a verified Firmy.cz presence, Czech-first content aligned to how the local market actually searches, registration with Seznam's webmaster tools so it indexes you properly, and a structure that makes your relevance unmistakable to a crawler that rewards clarity. None of that is exotic. It is just deliberately done, by someone paying attention to the Czech market rather than assuming Google's playbook covers everything.
We are not going to lay out the full method here, because the right moves depend heavily on your sector, your competition, and the state of your current site. The honest answer to "what exactly should we do" is that it depends, and working that out is most of the value. But the principle is simple: treat the Czech market as a real market with its own rules, not as a translation of a market you already understand.
The AI layer is coming for this too
One more thing worth saying. Search is shifting toward AI assistants that summarise and recommend rather than list links, and that shift is not Google-only. The same signals that make you legible to a search crawler, clarity about what you do, consistency across the web, genuine relevance, are what make you legible to an AI system deciding who to recommend. Building that clarity into a site now pays off across Google, Seznam, and whatever your customers are asking an assistant tomorrow. We wrote more about that in AI is becoming the new search.
If you are entering the Czech market, or you are already here and quietly losing the Seznam half of it, that is exactly the kind of thing we build for from day one. Take a look at how we approach search and visibility, or tell us about your site and we will give you a straight read.