SEO Wicklow

Google has never eaten in your dining room or watched your van arrive on time, so it cannot rank you on any of that. What it does instead is ask a few blunt questions. What exactly do you sell, how far are you from the person asking, are you open at this minute, and have real customers chosen you lately. Answer all four and your name sits in the map box with the number under it. Answer two and you are somewhere below the fold, where the searching has usually finished.

Most businesses in the county answer two, and it is almost never laziness. The profile was put up in the first week of trading and the hours have not been touched since. The website carries one services page with eight jobs listed on it, so it is never the best answer to any of them. The reviews came in a burst and then dried up. And the only place name on the whole website is Wicklow, so a man in Arklow searching at nine on a Tuesday night is handed whoever bothered to write Arklow down.

Something else here works in your favour once you spot it. A good share of those searching for what you sell are not in the county at all. They are in Dublin picking somewhere to eat on Sunday, or looking for a bed near Glendalough in October, and all they have to judge you on is your photographs, the reviews under them, and whether the page sounds like it was written for somebody who has never been here. Plenty of businesses in Wicklow still write as though everyone already knows them.

Fixing it is dull work rather than clever work, which is exactly why the field stays short. Finish the profile. Write a page for each job rather than one page covering the lot. Ask for the review while the customer is still pleased with you. Get Greystones, Rathdrum, Blessington, Kilcoole and Baltinglass onto the site in writing, because a search that names one of them has to have somewhere to arrive. The northern end takes more effort than the south, since Bray and Greystones are busier than Arklow or Baltinglass, but in any single trade the number of businesses doing all of it properly is still small enough to count on your fingers.

Start with what you are buying. Somebody within driving distance goes looking, and the name that comes back is yours, in the map with the phone number right there, in the results below, and in the answer Google assembles above the whole lot. The phone goes. The month’s report names the search that made it ring.

Four jobs do it, and there is nothing clever in any of them. Your Google Business Profile filled to the last field, the correct category, every service entered, photographs from this summer, opening hours that hold up over a bank holiday, and the places you travel to written in. One page per service, written as though the reader has never come across your name, so the search for that single job lands on the page about that single job. Reviews arriving week after week from people you actually served, asked for while they are pleased and answered the same day. And the same address and the same number everywhere your name appears, from the directories through the trade registers to Local Enterprise Office Wicklow and County Wicklow Chamber.

Then the work nobody sees. The site made to load on a phone holding one bar of signal on the Sally Gap road. Prices and menus as text instead of a photograph of a printed sheet. Markup on the pages so there is no doubt which business the site belongs to, or where it is. Writing that deals with what people want to know before they book, in the words they use to ask.

Where a search has money in it and your name is nowhere, we tell you which search, what the work would be and how long it ought to take before it moves. Nothing turns up in the report that you did not agree to.

Our prices are published, so anybody can work out what a Wicklow budget buys without ringing a stranger to find out. Nobody here quotes a figure that depends on how you sounded on the phone.

The monthly report is written in enquiries. How many people rang, how many filled the form in, and which search sent each of them. Positions rise and fall on their own and have never paid a wage.

The reviews we put up are Google’s own, with the reviewer’s name still attached, left by businesses that pay us every month. Click any of them and you can read the rest of what that person has written.

We see Wicklow clients in the town itself, on Main Street, so talking about your campaign does not involve a drive to the far side of Dublin. The head office is in County Louth. Bubblehub started in 2013, and the person who plans your campaign is the person who carries it out, so there is nobody in the middle taking your question away to somebody you have never met.

Show me the Wicklow searches my trade is losing

Ask Google where to get a decent breakfast in Greystones and an answer appears before a single result does, with business names inside it. ChatGPT hands out names for the same question. Neither of them is inventing anything. They both read the evidence the map has read since it started, a profile filled out to the last box, reviews dated this month, and pages that say in plain words what the business does and who for.

So there is nothing separate to buy, and anybody selling you an AI package is charging you twice for the same work. What it does add is a way of writing. Your prices, your hours, the areas you travel to, and what people want cleared up before they commit, kept as text rather than buried in a picture.

It goes into every Wicklow campaign with no line on the invoice for it. When that answer lists a few businesses for your trade in your own town, the aim is for yours to be among them, and the report says the month it starts.

The form or the phone, whichever suits you. A working day later, back comes a list of what this county types in when it wants your trade, how many of them there are each month, where you land on those searches today and whose name is above yours. There is no charge for it, and if you would rather hand the work to somebody else afterwards, hand it to them.

Once you are in, the first fortnight is spent measuring. Search Console says where you are already turning up. What the site is doing badly. Which directory entries still carry an old number or a dead address. And what the businesses Google currently prefers in your trade have that you have not.

The month after that is the groundwork. The profile gets finished and the listings get corrected. Technical faults are cleared worst first. Asking for a review becomes a step at the end of every job, and tracking goes in before anything else changes so the before is honest. Then the pages get written, the ones worth the most money first, with a page apiece for the towns the work should come out of.

Come the third month your name should be showing up in the map when somebody nearby searches, and the report should be tying each enquiry to the search behind it and the place it came out of. Trade and town searches move a long way ahead of the bare county word here, so that is where the early money goes. If three months pass with nothing shifting, the report says so in plain language and the plan gets rewritten rather than repeated.

Look at what the county types into Google and you can see who is being chased. Restaurants take 5,200 searches a month across Wicklow and Bray, hotels 2,780, taxis 1,470 and tyres 1,360. Massage sits on 1,320, gyms on 1,310, hairdressers and pharmacies on 1,140 apiece, barbers on 1,050 and takeaways on 960. Each of those searches is a person who has already made up their mind to spend and is only picking the name.

A restaurant is won on photographs from this season, reviews from last month and opening hours nobody has to guess at on a wet Sunday in February. A hotel or a guesthouse is fighting the booking sites over its own name, so the job is to take that name back and make booking direct the easier thing to do. Tyres at 1,360 a month is a search made standing beside a flat one, so the number has to be tappable and the page has to say how soon you can take the car in.

The trades tied to a premises, barbers, hairdressers, gyms and pharmacies, are settled in the map and nowhere else, which makes them the quickest win on the list. A taxi at 1,470 a month is chosen at midnight by a tired person with one hand free. Massage at 1,320 is a trust decision, so the page has to name who does the treatment and say what an hour costs.

There are businesses it does not suit. If the phone needs to ring by Friday, run ads instead, and we would tell you that rather than take your money. If the budget tops out at a few hundred a month, your own profile will do more with it than we could. Everybody else in the county has a winnable first place sitting in front of them.