Dublin 13 is two places that happen to share a postcode. At one end is Howth: the harbour, the West Pier with its fish shops and restaurants, Main Street, the cliff walk, and a DART station that empties day trippers onto the front every fine weekend. At the other end are Baldoyle, Donaghmede, Bayside, Clongriffin and the Kilbarrack side, where people commute in on the same DART line and want a plumber, a creche or a barber close to home. Website design in Dublin 13 starts with knowing which of those two trades you are in, because the customer is different. We are based in Dublin and we come out to meet you, whether that is a morning on the pier before the lunch rush or a quiet half hour in a shop in Baldoyle village.
Day trippers and neighbours
Howth’s visitors search on the move. They are on the DART out from Connolly typing “seafood Howth” or “coffee near Howth harbour”, or they are standing at the end of the cliff walk looking for somewhere to eat. They have never heard of you, they decide in under a minute, and they judge your Google listing before your front door: the photos, the hours, the reviews, whether a menu is there. Sutton Cross gets a share of that passing trade, since every car heading for Howth goes through it, with a settled local population behind it.
In Baldoyle, Donaghmede and Bayside the search is slower and the stakes are higher. Someone typing “electrician Baldoyle” at eight in the evening has a problem and rings the first number that looks real. Local Facebook groups do a lot of the recommending on this side of the district, and the name that gets recommended is the one people can find again on Google the next morning.
Saying where you are, both ways
People search by the district number and by the village in roughly equal measure, so your page should carry both. “Dublin 13” and the Eircode routing key D13 belong in your address and in the structured data behind the page. The village name belongs in your title, your opening line and your Google Business Profile, because nobody searches “fish and chips D13”. If you serve the wider coast, say it plainly: a cleaner based in Donaghmede who also covers Portmarnock and Malahide should have that in one sentence, not buried in a list of keywords.
Practical notes count for more here than in most districts. Parking in Howth is scarce at weekends, so tell visitors the DART stop is beside the harbour. Hours on the pier change between summer and winter, and your page should change with them, which is why every site we build comes with a self-edit page you can open from your phone. Reviews are the other half of a harbour business, and we have written a guide on getting more Google reviews without breaking Google’s rules.
The pier businesses that only have Instagram
A lot of Howth’s food trade lives on Instagram, and so do the weekend market stalls, the boat trips and a fair number of B&Bs and holiday lets. Instagram is good at the photos and bad at everything else: a tourist searching Google never sees it, the hours are buried in a bio, and there is no booking button that belongs to you. A one-page site with the same photos, a menu, a map and a booking link does the work Instagram cannot, and it gives your Google listing a proper website to send people to. The basics of that are in our guide to what local SEO actually is.
Plans and what they cost
Most Dublin 13 shops and trades start on Essentials at €499 to set up and €50 a month. Restaurants and B&Bs taking bookings and deposits go for Complete. Both are on the pricing page, and the restaurants page shows what a harbour restaurant’s site needs. The village pages for Howth, Sutton, Baldoyle and Kilbarrack look at each place on its own.