SEO Kerry

Google has no opinion on who does the better job in this county. It has evidence, and it only ever asks four things. Who sells this. Who is near the person asking. Who is open at the minute they ask. And who has been chosen lately by customers who put their names to it. Get all four right and you are among the three on the map. Get two right and you are parked where nobody scrolls.

Most of the businesses here get halfway. The profile went up the week the doors opened and nobody has been back into it since, so the category is nearly right and half of what you sell is missing from it. The website has one page trying to cover eight jobs at once, which is why no single search finds any of them. Reviews stopped landing about a year in. And the site says Kerry, full stop, so anybody typing Castleisland, Killorglin or Cahersiveen into the box gets handed to a business that took the trouble to name them.

Then there is the part that belongs to this county alone. A great share of the people searching here are not from here. They are on the Ring, out on the peninsula, off the train at Killarney, and they have no name in their head at all. They type the thing they want and the place they are standing in, and they ring what comes back. Thirty years of being well thought of locally counts for nothing in that moment, which is hard on an old name and a gift to a newer one.

None of the work is difficult and almost none of it is done. The list of Kerry businesses that have finished it is short, two or three a trade in the bigger towns and often nobody at all west of Killorglin. Finishing it is a job of months, not years, and once you are there, anybody who wants your place has to do the whole lot and then wait for it to count.

Start at the end of it. Somebody out your side of the county wants what you do, and it is your name sitting in the map with a phone number right beside it, your page first in the results underneath, and your business among those Google names in the answer it prints over the lot. Then the phone goes. A month later the report names the search that made it go.

Four jobs get you there. A Google Business Profile finished off completely, the right category, every service listed on its own line, photographs taken this season, hours nobody has to double check at Easter, and a service area that follows the roads you really travel. One page per service, written for a person who has never heard of the business, so a search for that job lands where it should. Reviews coming in all year instead of in bursts, asked for while the customer is still delighted, and answered the way you would answer across a counter. And the name, the address and the number agreeing with each other in every place they are published, on Golden Pages, in the directories your trade keeps, at Tralee Chamber Alliance and Killarney Chamber, and in anything Local Enterprise Office Kerry has on file for you.

Beneath all that sits the technical end. The site made quick on a phone holding one bar halfway up a mountain road, tagged so Google is in no doubt about the company or the address, and stocked with what a Kerry customer wants settled before they commit. What it costs, how far you travel, how soon you could be there, who actually turns up.

Anything with a season gets one thing more. The page that sells July has to be earning its keep in February, because February is when the searching is done, and a page published in June has missed the trade it was written for.

Every agency in the country will tell you it gets businesses found. The only part of that worth anything to you is the part you can test before you hand over money.

Our rates are on the site, split into bands, and each one lists the work it pays for, so you can cost a Kerry campaign without ringing a soul and without sitting through a call whose real purpose is finding out what you can afford.

The monthly report counts enquiries. Calls, forms and the search sitting behind each of them, because a rank on a screen does not pay wages. The reviews we show were all left on Google by businesses that put their names to them, so they can be read where they sit.

We have been at this since 2013, and the person who works out your plan is the person who carries it out. Nobody gets put in between, so there is no monthly ritual of explaining your own business over again.

Kerry meetings happen on High Street in Killarney. Our own office is in County Louth. Whichever desk you end up at, the same hands stay on the campaign.

Check my trade against the Kerry searches

Ask Google where to eat in Dingle, or how to get a taxi in Tralee on a Sunday, and it writes you an answer before it shows a single result, with businesses named inside it. Ask ChatGPT to put three days in Kerry together and it hands back names as well. Neither of them is new. Both work off the same evidence the map has leaned on for years, a complete listing, reviews from the last few weeks, and pages that describe a business the way a person would describe it.

Nothing extra needs buying here, and we would not sell it to you. An AI answer is a search result. The same work wins both. What it does change is how plainly you have to write, because a machine quoting you uses what is on the page and invents nothing to cover a gap. Your prices, the ground you cover, your hours, and the straight answer to whatever people ask before they book.

It counts for more here than in most counties, because a Kerry holiday is planned at a kitchen table somewhere else entirely. By the time the car comes off the motorway the list is made. That work is part of every Kerry campaign we take on, and you will see in the report when your name starts showing up inside those answers.

Use the form, or ring the number. One working day later you get the list of searches that carry money in your trade here, where you show up on them now, and the names showing up ahead of you. None of that costs anything, and nothing stops you handing it to another agency and asking what they would do.

If you want to carry on from there, two weeks go into the audit. What Search Console says the site already earns, what a crawl finds broken, every record carrying your details checked against the real ones, and a look at what the names holding your best searches have done that you are missing.

The month after that is the foundations. Profile completed and confirmed, the category and the area you cover put right, bad records chased down or killed off, a review habit fitted to the way you close a job, and tracking wired in so each call and form says which page and which search sent it. Then the service pages, worked through in whatever order the searches justify.

By the end of the first quarter the map should be showing you around the address you trade from, and the first report will break the enquiries down by search and by town. Here the town searches move earliest, a trade plus Tralee, a trade plus Killarney, with the plain county term coming along behind them. If a quarter ends and nothing has stirred, you will read it in the report and the plan gets rebuilt.

The numbers say what the county wants. Hotels at 4,800 a month, taxis at 3,650, restaurants at 3,110, then massage on 1,390, gyms on 1,040, hairdressers on 1,030 and barbers on 1,000, with bed and breakfasts on 910, pharmacies on 900 and florists on 890. Behind every one of those is somebody with money out, choosing between the names on a screen.

A hotel or a bed and breakfast has two customers with nothing at all in common. One has never set foot in the county and needs photographs from this season, reviews with dates on them and a page answering what is within walking distance. The other has been coming since childhood and needs to find you in four seconds and book without three redirects in the way.

Taxis at 3,650 a month is the loosest money on the list. That search happens outside a hotel near midnight with one hand on a case, and it goes to whoever has a tappable number and a listing that says the doors are open. Restaurants go the same way and just as quickly, decided on the photographs, on how recent the reviews are, and on whether the hours for tonight are correct.

The premises trades live almost entirely inside the map. A gym, a barber, a hairdresser or a pharmacy is being picked by somebody new to the town deciding between two names, not weighing up a county, and the finished listing takes it. The quiet trades, the solicitors, the accountants, the engineers, get a fraction of those searches and many times the money per job, so their pages win by being clear about what happens, who does it and what it comes to.

It does not suit everybody. If the calls have to come this week, Google Ads does that job, and we would rather tell you than take your money. If the spend available is two hundred a month, your own profile is a better home for it until there is more behind you. For anybody else trading here, first place is a fair fight and worth the entry.