Most of a contractor’s work arrives the way it always has: a farmer sees your outfit in the next field, asks at the mart, or has used you since his father’s time. The site is not for them. It is for the man who took over the home place and does not know who does the slurry around here, the part-time farmer in north county Dublin with forty acres and a job in town, the equestrian yard that wants paddocks topped and ditches cleaned, and the builder who needs a digger and a driver for a week. Those people search, “silage contractor Fingal”, “hedge cutting Meath”, “reseeding contractor near me”, and websites for agricultural contractors in Dublin and the counties around it are thin on the ground, so a plain one stands out.
A list of jobs, a list of parishes, a number
The page does not need to be clever. It needs a list. Silage: pit and bale, mowing, raking, the harvester and wagons. Slurry: tanker or umbilical, trailing shoe or dribble bar, agitation. Reseeding, ploughing, sowing, fertiliser and lime spreading. Baling and wrapping of hay, straw and haylage. Hedge cutting, ditching, drainage. Dung spreading, topping, digger work with a driver. If fencing is a sideline in the winter, it goes on the list too.
Then the parishes and townlands you cover, by name, not “Leinster”. A farmer in Garristown wants to see Garristown. Then the one question new customers are shy about: do you do small acreage. Answer it. Rates are your call; most contractors would rather say how they charge (by the acre, the hour or the bale) and give the number on the phone, and the page can do exactly that.
The year from the cab
January: slurry goes out the week the closed period lifts, and the phone starts. February: fertiliser, lime, and the last of the hedges before cutting stops at the end of the month. March and April: reseeding, ploughing, sowing. Late May and June: first cut, eighteen-hour days, nobody answers anything. July and August: second cut, hay, straw, baling. September: hedge cutting opens again, third cut, reseeding, maize. October to December: drainage, ditching, fencing, and the kit goes to the machinery mechanic for the winter.
The site carries a one-line notice you change from the phone in the yard: “Booking first cut now”, “Hedge cutting from 1 September”, “Slurry list open”. It takes thirty seconds and it is the first thing a farmer sees.
Photographs that do the talking
A farmer judges a contractor by the kit and the headlands. The harvester in a field at dusk, the trailing shoe working, a tidy bale stack, the digger on a drain with the water running, the yard with the machines lined up. Phone photos from the cab are exactly right; a designer’s photos would look wrong. Name the machines and the year if you like, because farmers notice, and they notice a clean machine more than a new one.
The phone in the cab
You cannot answer the phone on the harvester, and you cannot ring twelve people back at midnight. A WhatsApp button on the page means the farmer sends “any chance of the back field Thursday” and you answer from the headland when you stop for diesel. An enquiry form sends the same thing to your email as well. The Google Business Profile is set up as a service-area business, so no shop address is needed, with your parishes and seasonal hours on it, because that listing is where “silage contractor near me” lands. How that works is in what is local SEO. If you are a member of the FCI, the contractors’ association, say so on the page.
Ten minutes and a list of machines
Your list of services and the kit behind each. The parishes you cover. Whether you give rates on the page or on the phone. Photos from the cab. Your phone number and WhatsApp. Your busy months, so the seasonal notices are ready to switch on. Ten minutes, by phone, in the evening if that is when you are off the machine.
Plan, price, and working by phone
Essentials is the plan for a contractor: €499 to set up and €50 a month, VAT on top, no contract, for the site, the listing, the notices and the monthly report. Complete at €1,499 and €100 a month adds the managed listing, business email and a chat box, which a bigger outfit may want. Most contractors are outside Dublin, so the first chat is by phone or video call and everything after is WhatsApp. The detail of each plan is on the pricing page.