SEO Derry

Two spellings, two searches, one business. Somebody in Coleraine looks for your trade with Derry after it and the next person uses Londonderry, and Google treats those as separate questions with separate winners. Most sites in this county answer one and ignore the other, which gives half the work away before anything else has been decided.

After that it comes down to what Google can verify. Whether the business does the thing being asked about, whether it is near enough to be useful, whether it is open, and whether people have chosen it recently. The firm on top satisfies all of that. You probably satisfy the first and not much beyond it.

The holes are the same all over the county. A profile with the wrong category on it and half the services left blank. A single page trying to cover eight jobs, so no search has anywhere exact to land. Reviews that stopped years ago. A site that names the city and nothing else, so Limavady, Dungiven, Portstewart and Magherafelt go to whoever wrote them down.

There is real competition here, more of it than in most counties up this end, because the city pulls firms in from a wide catchment and the search gets made often. That makes the county name a slow climb. The town searches, and the ones with a trade and a town together, come much faster, and those are the searches that ring a phone.

Here is the end of it, which is what you are actually paying for. A customer in Limavady wants what you sell, searches with the town or the city after it, and there you are. Top of the map with a number that dials itself, in the results below, inside the answer that tops them both. The phone rings after that, and the report puts a name on the search that caused it.

The work itself has no glamour in it. The profile completed and kept accurate, correct category, the full list of services, photographs taken this year, opening hours that hold up at Christmas and in July. One page for each service. Reviews requested as jobs finish and replied to when they appear. Your details identical in every directory and register that carries them, Londonderry Chamber of Commerce among them. Both spellings of the city handled on the site so neither search is thrown away.

Then the technical layer underneath. Pages that load on a phone in a hurry, markup that tells Google which business and which address stands behind them, and writing that deals with what a customer here asks before buying. Your buyers are looking at Google’s UK results, and that is the scoreboard your report uses.

When a search with money in it belongs to somebody else, you get the name of it, the work involved and a likely date. Nothing gets saved up for a follow-up call.

All of it can be checked in a few minutes, which is the only sort of claim worth making.

Trading since 2013. A campaign is planned and then carried out by the same people, so there is no handover, and no message has to be passed along to whoever actually did the work.

Prices are published rather than quoted, so a Derry business can settle the budget question in its own time. Reporting is counted in enquiries, because a position with no calls behind it is worth nothing to anybody. The reviews are Google reviews with names on them, left by clients who pay invoices.

There is a meeting address on the Strand Road for clients in this county, so nobody has to travel far to sit down with us. The office itself is over the border in County Louth. Whichever address a job starts at, the same people finish it.

Show me the names above me in Derry

Google now writes an answer of its own above a good share of searches, and businesses are named inside it. The same question put to ChatGPT brings names back as well. Those names are not picked out of the air. They come from a complete profile, reviews with fresh dates and pages that say clearly what is sold and who it is sold to.

The answer at the top is a search result like any other, and nothing new has to be bought to appear in it. It falls out of the same work, with one addition. Writing a machine can quote without wrecking the sense of it. Prices, hours, the areas covered, and plain replies to the questions people ask before committing.

Every campaign here has it included and not one of them is billed for it separately. The day it starts listing businesses in your line, in the city or along the coast, the aim is that yours is in the list, and the report shows the month it began.

The form or the phone, either does. One working day is all it takes to come back with what gets searched in your trade here, the position you hold today, and the names in front of you. That is not charged for and nothing is signed.

Take it further and a fortnight goes on the audit. What you rank for already, where the site is slow or broken, which directories still list an address you left, and what the businesses in front of you finished long ago.

The next month is groundwork. Profile completed, listings straightened out, the worst faults on the site cleared, reviews built into the end of every job, and tracking fitted so each enquiry can be traced to the search behind it. Then the service pages, taken in the order of what each one earns.

Three months in, your pin should be appearing for searches that start near your own door, and the first report should tie a town and a search to every enquiry. Here the trade-and-town searches move first, then the city, with the plain county name last of all. A quarter that produces nothing gets said out loud in the report, and the plan is rewritten rather than run again.

The county has a city at one end and a coast at the other, and they sell to different people. Derry is the centre for a catchment much wider than the county, and it buys the way a city buys, on reviews and on who answers quickest. Coleraine and Portstewart live on the summer, the students and the weekends. Limavady, Dungiven and Magherafelt are country towns with trade and contracting behind them.

City trades are the contested ones. A dentist, a solicitor, a garage or a restaurant in Derry is chosen off a map of three and a page of ten, so the profile has to be perfect and the reviews have to be recent. Health and professional services are picked on trust, which means naming the people, saying what happens at a first appointment and what it comes to.

On the coast the visitor knows nobody’s name at all. Hotels, guesthouses, restaurants and the activity trade are competing with booking sites for their own names, and the road back is answering the questions a visitor has and making it simpler to book direct. Around Limavady and Magherafelt the engineering and contracting firms sell to other businesses, where searches are few, orders are large and the page has to prove the work rather than describe it.

It does not suit everybody. Where the phone needs to ring by the weekend, Google Ads is the right spend and you will be told that straight. Where the budget is small, the profile and the reviews are yours to finish and they cost nothing but time. For the rest of County Derry, there is a first place worth holding.