SEO Armagh

Google holds no view on who does the better job. It has a list of things it can check. What the business does, how far away it is, whether it is open, and whether anybody has vouched for it lately. The name above you checks out on all of that. Yours checks out on half of it.

Start with the profile. Most of them in this county were set up in an afternoon and never touched again. Wrong category, a handful of services listed out of the dozen you offer, photographs from the year you opened, hours that have been wrong since the clocks changed. Google reads all of that as a business that might not be there any more.

Then the website. One page mentioning everything you do gives a search nowhere exact to land, so the work goes to a firm with a page per job. And if the only place name on the site is Armagh, every search made in Portadown, Lurgan, Keady or Tandragee goes to whoever typed those towns out.

How hard this is to fix depends on which half of the county you sit in. Around Craigavon there are firms doing the work properly and it takes a year of steady effort to get past them. Out towards the city and the border the field thins fast, and the calls start long before the year is up.

What you are buying arrives like this. A customer in Portadown wants your trade, types it into a phone with the town after it, and your name is first on the map, first in the results and inside the answer Google has written across the top. The call comes through. The report puts the words that caused it beside the date it arrived.

The list of work is short and dull. Your Google profile completed properly and kept that way, right category, every service written in, pictures taken this season, and the hours the door is actually open. A separate page for each thing you sell. Reviews asked for while the customer is still pleased, and answered when they appear. And one identical set of contact details in every directory, trade register and listing carrying your name, Armagh City Chamber included.

Beneath all that sits the technical end. Pages that open quickly on a phone with one bar of signal past Keady, markup telling Google which business is behind the page and where it stands, and writing that deals with what people here want to know before they part with money. Your customers see Google’s UK results, and that is where your position gets tracked.

When a search is worth money and somebody else is taking it, you get told the search, the work it would need and roughly when it would pay. That arrives in the report whether you ask for it or not.

Take the pieces one at a time and check them before you commit to anything.

The agency opened in 2013 and has run the same way ever since. Your plan is drawn up by whoever is going to work it, so nothing is lost in a handover and there is no third party to relay a question to.

The prices are published, which means the cost of an Armagh campaign can be worked out without asking anybody. Enquiries are what the report totals up each month, since a position on its own buys nothing at all. And every review on show came from Google, carrying the name of the person who wrote it, left by a business we invoice.

Clients in this county are met on Market Street in Armagh, so a meeting is a short drive rather than a day out. The main office is in County Louth. The same people do the work from either address.

Tell me which Armagh searches are worth having

For a lot of searches now, Google writes its own answer before the results begin, and businesses get named inside it. Ask ChatGPT who does this work around Armagh and it behaves much the same. Neither is inventing the names. They read a profile with no gaps in it, reviews dated inside the last few months, and pages that state the work and the customer, the same evidence the map has always used.

Nobody needs to sell you a product for that, and anybody offering one is selling air. An AI answer is another search result, won with the same jobs as the map. What it rewards on top is plain sentences a machine can lift, so your prices, your service area, your hours and your straight answers all have to be written down where they can be read.

It is part of every campaign run in Armagh and there is no extra charge for it. The day that answer starts naming firms in your trade around Portadown or the city, the aim is that yours is one of the names, and the report will show the month it changed.

Send the form or ring us. A working day later there is a list in your inbox of the searches your trade gets across Armagh, where you sit on each one today, and which firms sit above you. That costs you nothing, and nothing follows from it.

Go ahead and the first two weeks are spent measuring. Where you already appear, what the website is losing you, which directories still hold a number you gave up years ago, and which of the names above you has already done the obvious work.

Month two is where the ground gets laid. The profile finished, wrong listings corrected, site faults cleared in order of damage, the review ask made part of handing over the work, and tracking in place early so each call and form can be traced back to a search. Then the service pages, written one at a time, the most valuable of them first.

Three months along, your pin ought to be appearing for searches made near the premises, and the first report should name a town and a search against every enquiry. In Armagh the town terms shift first, Portadown and Lurgan well before the county word. If the quarter passes and nothing has moved, that goes in the report in plain words, and the plan is changed instead of repeated.

This is an orchard county with a manufacturing belt across the top of it, and the two halves buy differently. Around Portadown, Lurgan and Craigavon the money sits in trades serving a lot of houses, and every one of those trades is contested. Out by Keady, Tandragee and the city the customer base is smaller and far easier to own outright.

Growers, hauliers, agricultural contractors and engineering firms sell to other businesses. Fewer searches, bigger orders and longer decisions, so their pages have to carry the detail a buyer checks before ringing. The machinery, the accreditations, the jobs already delivered and the people who will answer the phone.

The consumer trades are decided on the map and the reviews. A barber, a dentist, a car dealer or a takeaway in Portadown is chosen from three names and a star rating, and the one that wins has a complete profile and reviews from this month. Builders, electricians and the rest are chosen on where they will travel, so those towns have to be written down.

Some businesses will get nothing from it. If the diary needs filling this week, ads do that and search does not, and you will be told so. If the budget is a hundred or two a month, put it into your own profile and your own reviews first, which costs time rather than money. Everyone else in County Armagh has a search worth taking.