Athy is a market town first. Emily Square sits in the middle with the old town hall, now the Shackleton museum, on one side, Leinster Street and Duke Street run out of it, and a short walk away the Barrow passes under the bridge beside White’s Castle, with the Grand Canal’s Barrow Line meeting the river at the edge of the town. Around all of that is the heart of Kildare’s tillage country, running south into Carlow and west into Laois. Macra na Feirme was founded here, which tells you what kind of town it is.
It is also a commuter town now, with the train to Heuston from the station on the Waterford line and new estates on the edges. Website design in Athy has to serve both: the farm trades and the market square shops, and the families who arrived in the last ten years and know nobody. We are in Dublin, so the first chat with an Athy business is a phone or video call, and the rest of the work is the same as it is for a client around the corner from us.
Where the customer comes from
Three kinds of customer find an Athy business. The farms around the town, out to Castledermot, Kilkea, Ballitore and across into Laois, who need contractors, machinery repairs, vets, fencing, fuel and the hardware shop, and who still ring a known number but increasingly look a new one up first. The town’s own households, who want a mechanic, a butcher, a hairdresser, a builder or a takeaway and search for it in the evening. And people from Monasterevin and Stradbally who use Athy because it is the nearest town for a particular thing.
All three search by the town name, and they search on a phone. In south Kildare, where the next town is a real drive away, the map on the phone decides who gets the call.
Saying Athy and meaning south Kildare
Athy’s Eircode is R14, and it is a true town code, which helps. The harder question for a trade here is the border. Carlow town is closer than Naas, and Laois starts a few minutes west of the town, so a contractor or a builder based in Athy works three counties and needs a page that says so, naming the villages and the towns in plain sentences. “Athy and surrounding areas” means nothing to Google; “Athy, Castledermot, Ballitore, Stradbally and Carlow town” does. The Google Business Profile should match that service area. We have written up what local SEO is for a business owner who wants the reasoning rather than the jargon.
The square, the shops and the hours question
For the shops on Leinster Street, Duke Street and the square, the website’s main job is to be the correct answer to small questions: are you open Saturday afternoon, do you have it in stock, where do we park, can we pay by card. The hardware shop, the butcher and the tyre centre answer those by phone all day long. A page that answers them once, and a Google listing with the right hours on a bank holiday, is the practical return. The guide on setting up a Google Business Profile is where most Athy businesses should start if they have nothing yet.
Trades that run on a Facebook page
Agricultural contractors, machinery and tractor repair, firewood and fuel suppliers, septic tank crews, fencing contractors, painters and plasterers: in Athy these mostly have a Facebook page and a mobile number that has not changed in twenty years, which is fine for the customers they already have and invisible to the new ones. A one page site with the trade in the title, the service area written out, three or four photos of real jobs and a call button is the whole of it.
The two plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, review requests, chat and the monthly local pages that a three-county service area needs. The pricing page has the detail, and the agricultural contractors page shows what a contractor’s site includes.