Dun Laoghaire is a town with a town’s full set of trades. George’s Street runs the length of it, Lower to Upper, with Bloomfield towards one end and Glasthule at the other, and halfway along, Marine Road drops to the seafront, the County Hall, the DART station and the Lexicon above the harbour. Off the street are the barbers, the tattoo studios, the pubs, the charity shops, the solicitors’ plates, the physios, the opticians and the coffee. Website design in Dun Laoghaire covers all of that, from a one-chair barber to a firm that has been on the street for generations.
The council sits here too, and the art and design college on Kill Avenue brings students. We are Dublin based and we come to the shop. Dun Laoghaire is the one place on this coast where a morning of meetings can all be done on foot.
Weekends on the pier, weekdays on George’s Street
The town has two timetables. Monday to Friday it belongs to the people who live from Monkstown to Glenageary and Sallynoggin and come in for the chemist, the barber and the lunch. Saturday and Sunday it belongs to the pier. The East Pier fills with walkers, the People’s Park market runs on Sunday, the DART brings families from the city for ice cream and a swim at the Forty Foot, and every cafe and pub between the station and Glasthule is busy.
Those weekend visitors do not know you. They search “coffee Dun Laoghaire”, “lunch near the pier”, “barber open Sunday” and take the map’s word for it. The locals, who do know you, search anyway to check you are open and to find the number. Both groups read the reviews.
Showing up for Dun Laoghaire and A96
Dun Laoghaire’s Eircodes begin with A96, which also covers Glenageary, Sandycove, Glasthule, Dalkey and Killiney. The name is its own problem: people type Dun Laoghaire, Dún Laoghaire and Dunleary, and your site, your sign and your Google Business Profile should use one spelling consistently rather than three.
Then the practical facts a visitor wants: minutes on foot from the DART, where to park, Sunday hours, whether you take walk-ins. For trades based in the town but working from Blackrock to Shankill, a plain sentence of service area does more than a page per suburb. What local SEO actually is explains why the same facts have to match everywhere.
The trades the town runs on
Behind the shopfronts Dun Laoghaire has the trades a town needs: plumbers and electricians for the Victorian terraces and the apartment blocks, painters who do the seafront houses between salt winters, cleaners for the holiday lets near the harbour, photographers who shoot weddings at the yacht clubs and along the seafront, guesthouses with rooms for the regatta weekends.
Most of them get work from reviews and repeat customers, and a site makes both easier: a review link sent after the job, photos of real work, a WhatsApp button, an enquiry form that reaches you in the van. Getting more Google reviews is where we would start for a trade here.
Instagram shops and market stalls
The Sunday market, the makers who sell through the gift shops, the tattoo artists with a full Instagram grid and no page, the personal trainers on the pier at 7am, the home bakers: Dun Laoghaire has a lot of business that exists only inside an app. Instagram shows none of it in a Google search. A page with the hours, the prices, a deposit button and a .ie domain gives those businesses a result when a stranger on the pier searches for exactly what they do. AI tools like ChatGPT are starting to answer those questions as well, and how to show up in ChatGPT answers explains what they read.
Price
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, review requests, live chat and the managed Google profile. Both are on the pricing page, and the barbers page is a good example of a one-chair business making full use of one.