People search for a pub with a reason. Are you showing the match. Do you do food, and until what time. Is there music on Thursday. Have you a room for a 21st, a christening or the afters of a funeral. Is the beer garden covered. What time do you open on Sunday. Websites for pubs in Dublin are judged on whether those answers are there and true, because the person asking is already in a coat and deciding between you and the pub at the other end of the village.
We set up the site and the Google listing, keep the hours honest and give you a page for the week’s events that you can change from behind the bar. You pour.
Are you showing the match
On a Six Nations Saturday or an All-Ireland Sunday the search is ‘pub showing the match near us’ and the pubs that have said so, on the site and on Google, get the crowd. A short ‘sport this week’ list that you update on Monday from your phone does it: the fixture, the throw-in or kick-off, the screens, whether you take table bookings for the big ones. If you do not show sport, say that too. Plenty of people search for the quiet pub.
Food, and until when
‘Do you do food’ is the second question, and ‘until what time’ is the real one. A pub kitchen that stops at nine on weekdays and four on Sundays needs those times on the page, separate from the bar hours, along with the menu as text with prices: the carvery, the toasties, the Sunday roast, the kids’ menu. Google and the AI assistants people ask for ‘a pub with food near Croke Park’ read text, not a photo of a chalkboard. When the chef changes the specials, you change the page.
The function room
Functions are the quiet money. A 21st, a 40th, a christening, a retirement, a funeral afters, a club presentation night. The enquiry usually arrives as a Facebook message that gets lost under the fixtures, or as a phone call to the bar on a Saturday night when nobody can hear it. A function page with the room, its capacity standing and seated, what you can do for finger food, whether there is a private bar and a sound system, and an enquiry form that asks the date, the numbers and the occasion, lands those enquiries in your email and on your WhatsApp with the details already filled in.
Funeral enquiries are their own thing. A family needs a quick yes and a simple menu, often the same week, and a line on the page saying you do them gently and at short notice is a kindness that gets remembered.
What’s on this week
Trad on Tuesday, a quiz on Wednesday, a band on Saturday, a DJ on the bank holiday Sunday. Most pubs post this on Facebook and nowhere else, which means Google knows nothing about it and anyone without Facebook sees a pub with nothing on. The site carries a plain list of this week’s events that you edit yourself in two minutes, and the same information goes to the Google listing. People searching ‘live music Dublin tonight’ are looking for exactly this and almost no pub gives it to them.
Hours: late nights, bank holidays, Good Friday
Pub hours are complicated and Google gets them wrong by default. Late opening Friday and Saturday, the Sunday times, the bank holiday Sunday that runs like a Saturday, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day closed, Stephen’s Day, New Year’s Eve. People still check whether a pub opens on Good Friday. One set of hours lives on the site and on Google, and you change both from your phone when the week is different. A pub with the wrong hours on Google loses a table of six that drove over and will not come back.
What we need from behind the bar
Your bar hours and your kitchen hours for every day, your menu with prices, your regular weekly events, your function room details and capacity, what sports you show, whether the garden is covered and heated, whether dogs or children are welcome and until when, photos of the bar, the snug, the garden, the function room and a couple of plates, and the Eircode so the pin is right. If the Google listing was set up years ago by someone who has since left, claiming a Google Business Profile explains the process and we sort it for you.
Price for a pub
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month: the site, the events page, the function form and the Google listing. Complete at €1,499 and €100 a month adds deposits for functions, review texts after meals and the managed listing with regular posts. The pricing page has both in full. Reviews about a slow carvery or a loud band are part of pub life, and how to reply to a bad Google review is worth reading before the next one. If your kitchen is the main event, the restaurants page covers reservations and party deposits in more detail.