SEO Laois

Think of Google filling in a form about your business before it decides anything. Box one, what is sold here. Box two, how far is this from the person holding the phone. Box three, is the door open at this hour. Box four, has anybody real chosen it lately. Tick all four and the business takes a place in the map. Tick half of them and it sits below the fold, and the fold is where money goes to die.

Half ticked is where most of this county is. A profile claimed years ago and abandoned before the categories were sorted. One page doing duty for every job the business does, which works out the same as having no page at all. Reviews that arrived early and were never asked for again. And a website that mentions Portlaoise and stops there, so Portarlington, Mountmellick, Abbeyleix, Mountrath, Stradbally and Rathdowney belong to whoever typed them.

Laois has one extra problem. Portlaoise and Portarlington sit near enough to Dublin and Kildare that Google will happily reach across the county bounds for a business when the ones here look half built. Nearness only counts once somebody writes it down in a form Google can read.

Work backwards from the sale. A person wants the thing you sell. They type. What lands in front of them is your business, up in the map with a number ready to call, again in the plain listing beneath, and again inside the answer Google composes across the top. They ring you. Four weeks later the report tells you which of those searches did it.

Four jobs, and none of them are difficult. First the Google profile, every field used, the category correct, each service named, this year’s photographs on it, hours that are honest over a long weekend, and the towns you drive to listed. Second, one page of its own per thing you sell, written for a reader who has never been in the door. Third, reviews, requested while the job is still fresh in the customer’s mind, and every one answered. Fourth, the same name, the same address and the same number wherever your business is listed, as far out as Laois Chamber, and Local Enterprise Office Laois with it.

Below the waterline there is more. A site that opens quickly for somebody standing at the services with one bar. Structured data, so there is no confusion about who this business is or where it stands. A price list written out where it can be selected and copied. And pages that deal with the awkward questions before the customer has to ask them. If there is money on a search and your name is nowhere near it, we name the search, price the work and give you a date.

Four things, all of them checkable before you speak to anybody. We publish what we charge. The monthly report is built around enquiries and the searches that caused them, because nobody has ever paid staff out of a ranking. The reviews are Google reviews, and every name on them belongs to a business you could ring. And Main Street in Portlaoise is where Laois clients are seen.

Since 2013 this is all we have done. The person who planned your campaign is on it every month afterwards, so you are not re-explaining the business to somebody new every quarter.

County Louth is where the head office sits, and the meetings happen at your end rather than ours.

Show me where Laois is looking for me

Type best used car dealer in Portlaoise into Google. Above the blue links there is now a written answer, and it has dealers named in it. The same question put to ChatGPT comes back with names as well. Neither machine made them up. Both are reading what the map reads, a profile where nothing was left blank, reviews carrying recent dates, and pages stating what is for sale and who it suits. What you are looking at there is a search result with the links taken out, and whichever work wins the map wins that too.

Nobody should be charging you separately for it. It comes from the four jobs above and from writing a machine can hand on without mangling the meaning. What you charge, what is in stock, when you open, where you deliver, and honest answers to the things people settle before they spend.

Every Laois campaign carries it without a separate line. When that answer hands out three businesses in your trade, your name should be in there, and the report shows you the month it starts.

Fill in the form or lift the phone. Inside one working day you get a note listing the searches behind your trade in this county, the volume on each, your own position today and the names above it. Free, and yours to take anywhere.

Appoint us and a fortnight goes on measurement. Search Console, for whatever you already surface on. A crawl, for whatever is broken. Every listing with your details on it, held against the real ones. And a straight look at whatever the ones ranking above you are doing differently.

Then a month of repair. The profile is brought to completion. The listings are straightened. Faults are cleared starting with the one doing most damage. Asking for a review gets written into the way a job closes. Tracking goes in ahead of all of it, so the starting point is honest. After that the pages, one at a time, the valuable ones leading, and a page each for the towns you want ringing you.

Three months in, you should be holding map places near your own door, and the report should be pinning every enquiry to a search and a town. Around here the town and trade terms move a long way ahead of the county one. Three months that produce nothing get recorded as three months that produced nothing, and the plan is pulled apart and rebuilt.

Hotels lead the county on 1,300 searches a month. Then car sales on 390. Massage, restaurants and skip hire take 260 apiece, wedding venues 210, blinds and plumbers 140 each, garden centres 110 and estate agents 90.

Car sales on 390 is the line worth staring at. Nobody looks up a car idly. The person doing it is about to spend more than they will spend on anything else this year, so the stock has to be listed, the finance explained, the trade-in answered and the reviews recent. A wedding venue on 210 behaves the same way, a handful of searches with a booking behind each one that pays for months.

Hotels on 1,300 pull off the motorway as well as out of the county, so a direct booking has to be quicker to make than going through an agent, and the photographs need to be this year’s. Blinds and plumbers on 140 apiece, and garden centres on 110, are household money coming out of a town that keeps growing, and the job goes to whoever replies first with a price and a day. Estate agents on 90 are picked on the names and the recent sales, so the page has to sell the people.

Some of this will not suit you. If the intention is to give it three months and stop, do not begin, because the pages will not have settled by then. If enquiries are needed by Friday, that is a job for ads. Everybody else in Laois is looking at a short field and a top spot nobody is defending properly.