SEO · Dublin & Ireland
The rankings worthhaving are theboring ones.
Search engine optimisation for businesses in Dublin and across Ireland. Slower than advertising and cheaper per enquiry once it lands, which is the whole argument for starting it before you think you need it.
Straight up
What most SEO reports are hiding
Almost every SEO report opens with the number of keywords in the top ten, and that number is easy to move. It goes up when you start ranking for searches nobody buys from, for questions people ask once out of curiosity, and for your own company name. None of that produces a phone call.
The question worth asking is much narrower. For the ten or fifteen searches somebody makes in the week before they hire a firm like yours, where do you appear, and what happens to them when they land on your page? That list is short enough to write on one sheet of paper, and most businesses have never written it down.
So that is where I start. Not with an audit of four hundred issues sorted by a tool, but with the handful of searches that are actually worth owning, and an honest read on whether you can own them.
What the work is
What you are actually paying for.
The search list, written down
Before anything technical, we agree which searches matter and roughly what each one is worth to you. Everything after this is measured against that list. If a fix does not move something on it, it waits.
Technical work, only the parts that bite
Crawling, indexation, page speed, the internal linking that decides which of your pages Google treats as important. Audit tools flag hundreds of issues and most of them change nothing. I fix the ones that are actually holding a page back and tell you why the rest can wait.
The pages you do not have yet
Most Irish businesses are missing pages, not keywords. One page covering five services will lose to five pages covering one service each, every time. Finding those gaps is usually the single biggest gain available.
Content written for the person, not the crawler
Pages that answer the question properly, in your voice, at the length the question deserves. Google has been good at spotting content written to hit a word count for years now, and readers were always better at it.
Local search
Your Google Business Profile, the map pack, reviews, and the citations that decide whether you show up for somebody searching two streets away. For a Dublin business with an office, this is often worth more than anything else on this list.
Measurement you can read
Rankings for the agreed list, organic enquiries, and which pages produce them. Not a forty-page PDF nobody opens.
The limits
What this will not do for you.
It does not work in four weeks
Three to six months before it is fair to judge, longer in a competitive area like legal or finance. If you need enquiries next month, that is a paid search conversation, not this one.
It cannot create demand that is not there
If nobody searches for what you sell, ranking first for it changes nothing. That sounds obvious and it is still the most common reason an SEO project fails.
It does not survive a site rebuild nobody planned
The fastest way to lose a year of SEO is a new website launched without redirects. If you are planning a rebuild, tell me before it happens rather than after.
Questions
SEO, asked properly.
For most Dublin businesses, somewhere between six and twelve months, depending on how competitive your area is and how much of the groundwork already exists. It is worth saying plainly that this makes SEO a bad fit if cash is tight right now. Paid search costs more per enquiry but it produces them immediately, and the honest sequence for a lot of businesses is ads first, SEO started quietly in the background, then the balance shifting as the SEO lands.
I do not buy them. Paid link networks are the fastest route to a penalty and the risk sits with you, not with whoever sold them. What does work is slower: being genuinely worth citing, industry directories that people actually use, local press, and relationships you already have. If someone quotes you a price for fifty links a month, that is the thing I am describing.
No, and neither can anyone else. Google does not sell positions and does not publish the algorithm. What I can do is show you the list of searches we agreed on and where you sit on it month by month, which is the closest thing to an honest promise available here.
Most businesses that can afford both should run both, because they answer different problems. Ads buy you the top of the page today and stop the moment you stop paying. SEO takes months and then keeps working. If you can only afford one and you need enquiries soon, start with ads. If you have patience and a long sales cycle, start with SEO.
Where it fits
These are rarely bought one at a time. Most work starts with whichever is most urgent and grows into the others once the numbers argue for it.
Next step
Thirty minutes, and an honest answer.
Tell me what you sell and what a customer is worth to you. I will tell you whether search is worth your money, roughly what it would take, and if the answer is no, what I would do instead.