Thorben Otten

About me

I run infiniWEB GmbH out of Lucerne, Switzerland. We design, build, and optimise websites for Swiss small and mid-sized businesses that need their site to do real work: bringing in qualified leads, surviving compliance reviews, and ranking in both classic search engines and the new generation of AI answer engines.

Background

My career in digital marketing started in 2012, after eight years in mid-market operations and project management. Those early years were not glamorous, but they taught me something I still rely on today. A website is part of a business system. Sales pipelines, fulfilment, customer support, and brand promises all touch the site, and the site has to hold up to all of them. That is why my work usually starts with a structural conversation about the business before a single pixel is moved.

Between 2012 and today I have lived and worked across Hong Kong, Seoul, London, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgart, Zurich, and Lucerne. The international stations are not vita points. They are a comparison basis. Different markets reward very different web cultures, and Switzerland has its own rules: trust matters more than persuasion, clarity wins over cleverness, and almost nobody responds well to pressure-selling.

Pioneer in Local SEO

I started consulting and speaking on Local SEO back in 2015, when the field was still called Google My Business and most marketers treated it as a checkbox. My thesis at the time was that a properly maintained business profile would soon outperform a meaningful share of paid search budgets for local service businesses. I have been refining that thesis ever since with healthcare clinics, regional service providers, and family-run mid-market firms.

Today: Generative Engine Optimization

My focus has shifted upstream. The new playing field is the answer surface of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and the AI overviews now embedded in classic search. Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is about making a brand quotable. The page has to be readable enough for a model to lift a clean fact, contextual enough that it picks you over a generic alternative, and authoritative enough to keep showing up across recurring questions. I treat GEO as the next step after Local SEO, not as a replacement for it.

Working philosophy

I work on fixed prices instead of hourly rates, because hourly rates reward slowness. Strategy comes before aesthetics, and outcome comes before activity. If a project does not have a clear thesis about who it serves, what it sells, and which question it answers better than anyone else, I would rather stop and rebuild that thesis than ship a beautiful site that fails to earn its keep. That sometimes makes the first conversation longer. It almost always makes the second year cheaper.

Twin-brand setup

infiniWEB runs on two domains by design. infiniweb.swiss is the strategy and consulting brand, with the deeper essays in the engine room section, the methodology behind GEO and Local SEO, and the projects we hand-pick. website-erstellen-lassen-schweiz.ch is the operations brand for the website-build itself, with transparent pricing, a glossary, and worked examples by industry. The split exists because the buying journey is split: people research strategy in one mindset and commission a build in another, and mixing the two muddles both.

Where to read more

The engine room on infiniweb.swiss is the place for longer pieces on positioning, GEO, and Swiss web culture. The glossary on website-erstellen-lassen-schweiz.ch is the place for plain-language definitions of the technical decisions that come up in every project.