SEO Bray

Google cannot taste the food or sit in the chair. It works off what it can verify, and only a few things count. Does the business do this thing, how close is it to whoever is asking, is it open right now, and have real people picked it in the last while. Score four and you are in the map. Score two and the search never reaches you.

Most of the town scores two. The profile went up in a rush before opening and nothing has been added since. One page on the website covers everything the business does, which makes it the best answer to nothing. The reviews stopped after the first summer. And the site never mentions Greystones, Delgany or Enniskerry, so those searches land somewhere else.

There is a particular problem here worth naming. A lot of your customers come out on the DART for the afternoon, and they are searching from Dublin before they arrive. They have your photographs, your rating and your opening hours to go on, and nothing else at all. If the profile looks half done from a train, they book the one that does not.

All of it is fixable and none of it is clever. Finish the profile. Give every service its own page. Ask for the review at the till or at the end of the job. Write Greystones, Delgany, Kilmacanogue and Enniskerry into the site so searches from those villages have somewhere to arrive. The seafront trades are busy, so it takes a few months rather than a few weeks, but the number of businesses doing all four is still short enough to pass.

What you are paying for is a name put in front of a stranger. Somebody wants what you sell, within a mile or two of you, and yours is the name Google puts up, on the map with the phone number under it, in the list below that, and in the answer written over both of them. Then the phone rings, and the report says which search rang it.

Four jobs, done all the way through. The Google profile completed, correct category, every service listed, photographs taken this season, hours that still hold good on a bank holiday Monday, and the areas you cover named. A page for every service, written so a visitor from Dublin can tell in seconds whether you are what they want. Reviews arriving all year, asked for at the right moment and answered. And your details matching on every site that lists you, County Wicklow Chamber and Local Enterprise Office Wicklow among them.

Then the invisible half. A site that opens straight away on a phone with the wind coming off the seafront. Menus and prices in text rather than photographed. Code that tells Google which business this is and where the door is. Writing that answers the thing a customer wants settled before they book, in their own words.

And when a search carries money and you are nowhere on it, you hear about that search, the work and the likely timescale. That is the whole conversation, every month.

The prices are on the site. You can work out which band a Bray business falls into without a phone call, and the figure does not move because of how the place sounded.

The report counts enquiries. Every call, every form, and the search sitting behind it. Nobody here will send you a chart of positions and call it a result.

The reviews on our site were left on Google by clients, names showing. You can look up the people who wrote them.

Bray clients are seen at 3 Main Street in the town, which saves anybody a drive up the M11 and around the M50. Head office is up in County Louth, a long way from the seafront, and that changes nothing about who does the work. We started in 2013, and whoever works your plan out is the one doing it, month after month, so nobody hands you on.

Show me what Bray is searching for in my line

Ask Google for somewhere to eat in Bray and there is now a written answer sitting above the results with names in it. The same question in ChatGPT produces names as well. Neither pulls them out of the air. They both run on the same things the map runs on, a profile with nothing left out, reviews with dates from this month, and pages that say what the business does in language anybody would use.

There is nothing extra to buy. It comes from the same work, with the pages written in sentences a machine can repeat without getting them wrong. Prices, opening hours, the villages you cover, and the questions people ask the night before, all put in writing where they can be read.

Every Bray campaign carries it, and nothing on the bill mentions it. When that answer names two or three places for your trade in this town, we want yours in the list, and the report names the month it starts.

The form or the phone, either does. Inside a working day there is a note back with the searches people in Bray make in your trade, what each is worth a month, where you appear now and who appears above you. No charge, and no strings on it either.

If we go ahead, the first two weeks are spent on facts. What you already appear for, what is slowing the site down, which directories carry an old number, and whatever the ones ahead of you have going for them.

Repair comes the month after. The profile gets finished, the directories get fixed, the technical faults get cleared in order of what they are costing, the review routine gets attached to the end of a job or a booking, and tracking goes in before anything else so the starting line is real. Then the pages, best earners first, and one for each village you want work from.

Three months in, the Bray map should have your name on it for searches made nearby, and the report should be sorting enquiries by search and by village. The trade searches here move before the town term does. If a quarter goes by and the numbers are flat, the report says it plainly and the plan changes.

The town’s own numbers show who is being looked for. Restaurants take 3,600 searches a month. Massage is on 1,000. Barbers, hairdressers, hotels and pharmacies take 880 each, gyms 720, and dentists, nail salons and solicitors 590 apiece. Every one of those is somebody deciding where to spend.

A restaurant on 3,600 searches is being chosen from a phone by somebody who is already hungry, so the photographs have to be recent, the reviews have to be recent, and the opening hours have to be right on a Sunday. A hotel at 880 is fighting for its own name against the booking sites. A gym at 720 fills up after Christmas and again when the schools go back, so the membership page has to be live before either.

Barbers, hairdressers and nail salons are decided entirely in the map, which makes them the cheapest thing on the list to win. A dentist or a solicitor at 590 is a slow decision made by somebody nervous, so those pages have to name the people, say what a first appointment costs and answer the question nobody likes asking. Massage at 1,000 runs on the same trust, bought faster.

There are businesses this does not suit. If the diary has to be full by the weekend, spend the money on ads and we will say so instead of taking it. If there is only a hundred or two a month going spare, that money does more sitting in your own profile than it would with any agency. Everybody else in the town has a place in the three within reach.