Laois is the county the M7 runs through, and for the last twenty five years that road and the two train lines have shaped it more than anything else. Portlaoise and Portarlington grew into commuter towns for Dublin, with estates full of people who leave at seven and get home at seven. Mountmellick, Stradbally, Abbeyleix, Mountrath, Durrow and Rathdowney stayed market towns and villages with farms around them. The Slieve Blooms close off the west, the Barrow runs along the Kildare border, and the Rock of Dunamase stands over the middle. Website design in County Laois has to serve both halves, the commuter and the contractor, and we do it from Dublin. We have no office in Laois. The first chat is a video or phone call, your photos and details come to us on WhatsApp, and the site is built from those. The monthly report and the changes work the same wherever you are.
A county that searches after the commute
A commuter county searches at odd hours. The person in Portarlington whose boiler stopped searches “heating engineer Portarlington” on the train home or at half seven in the kitchen, not at eleven in the morning. The family in a Portlaoise estate planning an extension does the searching on a Sunday. Those searches go to Google Maps on a phone, by trade and town, and the three results that show get the calls. Local Facebook groups still carry the recommendations, but even a recommended name is searched before it is rung, and a trade with no page and no Google listing is a name that goes nowhere.
For the market towns the pattern is older and slower. People in Abbeyleix or Durrow still ask around, but the person asking is more and more often somebody who moved in last year and has nobody to ask yet. They search too.
Picnic weekend, Steam Rally weekend
Stradbally swells for Electric Picnic at the end of the summer and for the steam rally on the August bank holiday weekend, and the towns around it feel both. Those visitors search from the field: a taxi, a chipper still open, a pharmacy, a B&B for a friend without a tent. They will take the first result that looks real and is open. A business whose hours and notices can be changed from a phone that morning does well out of both weekends.
Portlaoise to Rathdowney: say where you go
A trade that covers the county should not write “serving all of Laois”. Google shows a search from Mountrath a page that talks about Mountrath. The site needs each town written down with a sentence about the work done there, and the Google Business Profile needs the same towns as its service area. Portlaoise, Portarlington and Mountmellick share the R32 routing key; your Eircode belongs on the contact page, but the town names do the work. If your patch runs over the border to Athy, Monasterevin, Tullamore or Roscrea, say so. Our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile in Ireland covers service areas.
The farm side of Laois
Away from the M7, Laois is cattle and tillage with sheep on the Slieve Bloom side. The businesses around that farming run from the yard: agricultural contractors, septic tank crews, well drillers, roofers who do farm sheds as well as houses, landscapers, marquee hire, equestrian yards, the odd farm shop. Nearly all of them trade on a Facebook page and a number painted on the van. Their new customers, the Dublin family who bought a house with a well and a septic tank outside Ballinakill, do not know who to ring, so they search. A page that says what you do, where you go and what a visit involves gets that call. What local SEO actually is explains the rest.
Plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month for one site with your towns named. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds the monthly local pages, bookings, payments, chat and review requests. Both are on the pricing page; the rural trades are listed under websites for.