Kilkenny is a county with one city in the middle of it and a ring of towns that each face a different way. Castlecomer in the north, on the old coalfield, looks to the city and to Carlow and Portlaoise. Thomastown, Inistioge and Graiguenamanagh along the Nore and the Barrow are craft, river and visitor country. Callan in the west is a farming town on the road to Clonmel. Mooncoin, Piltown, Mullinavat and Ferrybank in the south are, in trade terms, part of Waterford city. Urlingford, Freshford, Ballyragget, Gowran and Bennettsbridge each have their own hinterland. The city pulls the shopping, the hospital trade, the festival crowds and most of the Google searches; the county does the farming and the building.
That shape is the whole challenge of website design in County Kilkenny for a business that works more than one place. A vet, a machinery mechanic, a well driller or a paving contractor based outside Callan does not serve Graiguenamanagh, and a site that says “all of Kilkenny” claims a patch nobody has. We are based in Dublin, so the first chat with a Kilkenny business is a phone or video call, and we build the site from the details and photos you send on WhatsApp. The rest of the service is the same for a farm outside Ballyragget as for a shop we visit in Dublin.
Towns, villages and what people type
People in Kilkenny search by the nearest town, not the county, and the county’s name is also the city’s name, so “plumber Kilkenny” means the city to Google. A trade in Thomastown that wants Thomastown, Inistioge, Bennettsbridge, Knocktopher and Stoneyford work needs those names written into the site in honest sentences. The R95 routing key covers the city and most of the county, so it does little to separate one town from another; the town names do that work. The south of the county around Ferrybank shares Waterford’s X91 key and competes with Waterford businesses, and should say so. Our guide to what local SEO actually is explains how Google matches a search to a page.
Dairy, horses, dogs and holiday lets
Kilkenny is dairy country, and the trades that follow it: milking machine and tractor repairs, fencing, fuel and firewood suppliers, well drillers and septic tank crews for the one-off houses, tree surgeons for the old estates. It is horse country too, with the racecourse at Gowran, livery yards and riding schools, and dog country, with kennels and catteries that fill every bank holiday. Along the Nore and the Barrow it is visitor country, with holiday lets and craft studios in Bennettsbridge, Thomastown and Castlecomer that sell to people who found them on a phone.
All of those run, mostly, on a Facebook page, a mobile and twenty years of being known. The customer that costs them is the one who is not from here: the family in a new house outside Kilkenny city who needs the tank emptied, the Dublin couple in a holiday let who want a riding lesson, the visitor who wants to find the potter’s studio. Those people search, and a plain site with the work, the places and the number is what they find.
One site, the towns named
A county-wide business does not need a site for every town. It needs one site, with its base stated honestly and each town it serves given a sentence or two about the work it does there, and a Google Business Profile with the same name, address and phone, set up as a service area business if the yard is at home. With Complete we add a short local page each month for the towns that matter most. The domain is registered in your own name; we have written about how to register a .ie domain.
Plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month, and covers one site with the towns named. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month, adding bookings, payments, chat, review requests and the monthly local pages. Both are on the pricing page, and the rural trades we build for are under websites for.