Grattan Square is wide enough that on a market morning the stalls, the parked cars and the people crossing from the bank to the butcher all fit, and still the square does not feel full. Dungarvan is the town of west Waterford: the council’s civic offices are on Davitt’s Quay beside the harbour, the castle stands at the end of the quay, the causeway crosses the Colligan to Abbeyside and on to Clonea Strand, and the Waterford Greenway ends here after its run from the city. Behind the town are the Comeraghs; across the bay are Helvick and the Ring Gaeltacht; up the Blackwater are Cappoquin and Lismore.
Website design in Dungarvan has to serve two customers who stand on the same square. One lives in Abbeyside, works at the plant or the hospital, and wants a plumber, a dentist and a decent Saturday lunch. The other arrived on a bike from Kilmacthomas an hour ago and has never been here before. We should be plain about our own position: we are in Dublin, we have no office in Dungarvan, and we work with businesses here remotely, over a video call and WhatsApp, building the site from the photos and details you send.
The local search and the greenway search are different
The local customer searches by town name and by need: “electrician Dungarvan”, “physio Dungarvan”, “takeaway Abbeyside”. They search in the evening, from an X35 address, and Google uses the distance and the listing to decide whose page they see. Being correct on your Google Business Profile, with the hours right and photos of real work, is the whole game for a trade here.
The greenway visitor searches differently and earlier. “Dungarvan lunch”, “bike hire Dungarvan”, “B&B Dungarvan greenway”, typed the night before from Waterford or Dublin or a hotel in Lismore. They need to know how far you are from the route, whether there is somewhere to leave the bikes and whether the kitchen is open at eleven on a Sunday. A page that answers those three questions wins the table.
April, and the rest of the year
The West Waterford Festival of Food fills the town for a weekend in April and brings people who come back in July. For restaurants, cafes, delis, bakeries and the farm producers around the town, that weekend is a chance to be found by people who will search for you again. A page that is live before the festival, with the menu readable on a phone and a way to book, turns a conversation at a stall into a return visit. For the rest of the year the same page carries the Sunday lunch trade from the city and the summer trade from Clonea.
The trades of a working town
Dungarvan is not only a visitor town. It has builders, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, tyre centres, kitchen fitters and agricultural contractors whose customers are the farms and houses from Stradbally to Tallow. Many of them have a van, a number and a Facebook page. The person who moved into a new house on the edge of town last month, or who took over a farm outside Cappoquin, has no neighbour’s recommendation yet and searches instead. If you want the background on how that search works, we have written what local SEO is, in plain words.
Prices and plans
The two plans are the same everywhere we work. Essentials is €499 up front and €50 a month for the site, the domain, hosting and the Google listing. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, chat, review requests and monthly Google work. The pricing page has every line of it, and the cafes page shows what a food business’s site looks like.