Why can't people find you? I'll tell you exactly what's stopping them.
You have a website. You might have a Google listing. But when someone in Ireland searches for what you do, they get somebody else. I look at your business the way a customer, Googlebot and an AI assistant each see it, then hand you a prioritised list of what's broken and what to fix first — in plain English, with no retainer attached.
Start free: the 5-point visibility check
Before you spend anything, I'll run five checks and send you a single page telling you whether you have a real problem. No call, no pitch, no card. One working day.
1. Can Google index you at all?
Whether your pages are actually in Google's index, and whether anything on the site is telling Google to stay away.
2. Is your sitemap real?
Whether you have one, whether robots.txt names it, and whether the URLs in it actually load.
3. Core Web Vitals on a phone
Your real-world LCP, INP and CLS figures from Google's own field data, not a lab score.
4. Google Business Profile
Whether you have a verified profile, whether it's visible, and whether it matches your website.
5. Can AI assistants read you?
Whether your site blocks the crawlers behind AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and whether your content survives without JavaScript.
Then it's your call
If the five checks come back clean, I'll say so and you've lost nothing. If they don't, the full audit is €450.
The reasons Irish businesses aren't found
After twenty-odd years of this, the same handful of causes come up again and again. None of them are exotic, and most have never been looked at.
The site tells Google not to index it
A leftover "discourage search engines" tick in WordPress, a stray noindex, or a robots.txt rule from a staging site that went live with it. Instant invisibility, and completely silent.
The Google Business Profile is unverified or miscategorised
For a local business this is usually the single biggest lever. Wrong primary category, an address set up as a service area when it shouldn't be, or a profile that was never verified at all.
Your details disagree across the web
An old phone number on one directory, a previous address on another, "Ltd" in some places and not others. Google resolves conflicts by trusting you less.
Pages don't say what you do or where
"Welcome to our website" is not a search term. Pages that never name the service and the county can't rank for either.
Nobody can tell the pages apart
Identical titles, duplicate pages under two URLs, a sitemap listing pages that redirect elsewhere. Google picks one and it's rarely the one you wanted.
It's too slow on a phone, on Irish mobile data
Most of your visitors are on a phone. A hero image that's a 4000px JPEG and a page builder shipping CSS for the whole site loses people before the page paints.
What the €450 audit covers
Everything below, on your actual site, by hand. Tools do the measuring; I do the judging and the prioritising.
Can you be found?
- Google Business Profile: verification status, primary and secondary categories, service area setup, opening hours, photos, products and services, Q&A, and review velocity.
- Where you rank and where you don't: the searches you'd expect to appear for, and who is taking them instead.
- NAP consistency: name, address and phone across your site, your profile and the Irish directories that Google reads.
- Map pack visibility: whether you appear in the local three-pack for "near me" style searches, and what's keeping you out.
Can search engines read you?
- Indexation: what's in Google's index, what isn't, and why — including pages excluded without you ever being told.
- Crawlability:
robots.txt, crawl traps, orphan pages, redirect chains and loops. - Sitemap: whether it exists, is named in
robots.txt, lists canonical URLs only, and carries honestlastmoddates. - Canonicals and duplication: pages competing with themselves, HTTP and HTTPS versions, www and non-www, trailing-slash twins.
- Titles and meta descriptions: every page, checked for duplication, truncation and whether they name the service and the place.
- Internal linking and broken links: which pages have no route in, and which links go nowhere.
- JavaScript rendering: whether your content exists in the HTML or only appears after scripts run.
Can they trust you?
- Structured data: validated JSON-LD for your business, services, articles and FAQs, and whether the entity described actually matches the business.
- Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP and CLS from Google's field data plus lab testing, on mobile first.
- Security: SSL configuration, security headers, mixed content, and whether anything looks compromised.
- Open Graph and social meta: what your pages look like when shared to WhatsApp, Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Contact paths: whether a visitor on a phone can actually call you, whether the form arrives in your inbox, and whether directions lead to your door. I test the form.
AI Overviews and AI search: the part most audits skip
A growing share of searches now get answered above the results, or in ChatGPT and Perplexity, without anyone clicking through. You cannot buy your way into that and nobody can guarantee it. What you can do is stop disqualifying yourself, and almost every site I look at is disqualified on at least two counts.
Are the AI crawlers even allowed in?
The bots that fetch pages for AI answers are not Googlebot. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and friends each need to be allowed, and plenty of Irish sites block all of them by accident — often via a security plugin or a Cloudflare bot rule nobody remembers switching on.
Does your content exist without JavaScript?
Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript the way Google does. If your prices, services or opening hours are injected by a script, they are invisible to the systems writing the answer about you.
Is there a quotable answer near the top?
AI answers lift short, self-contained passages. A page that takes four paragraphs to get to the point gives nothing to quote. A page that answers the question in two sentences under a clear heading does.
Do your facts agree with themselves?
If your website says one price, your Google Business Profile says different hours and a directory has an old phone number, an AI assistant has no way to decide which is true — so it usually names a competitor whose facts line up.
Is the business a described entity?
Structured data, a real About page with a named human, and consistent mentions elsewhere are how these systems work out that you exist and what you're qualified to talk about. An anonymous site is a weak citation.
Are you declaring your terms?
You can allow AI search to quote you while declining to be used as training data. That's a deliberate setting, via robots.txt and a content signal — not something to leave to chance. I'll set it to whatever you actually want.
You can see how I apply this to my own site: wpdublin.com/llms.txt and robots.txt are both public, and the audit includes an llms.txt and crawler policy written for your business.
What you actually get
Not a crawler export with 4,000 rows sorted by nothing. The deliverable is a document you could hand to a developer on Monday morning.
- A one-paragraph answer to "why aren't people finding me", at the top, in plain English.
- A prioritised fix list, ordered by what will move the needle soonest against how much work it is. Each item says what's wrong, why it matters, and what "fixed" looks like.
- Evidence for every finding — the URL, the screenshot, the measurement. Nothing on the list is an opinion you have to take on faith.
- The quick wins separated out, so you can do the free half-hour of work yourself immediately if you want to.
- A written answer to the question you'd ask next. If the honest answer is "your website is fine, your Google listing is the problem", that's what it will say.
One flat €450. No retainer, no upsell built into the report. If nothing needs doing, the report says so — and that's a legitimate outcome I've delivered before.
When this isn't the right thing to buy
- Your site is down or hacked right now. Fix that first — emergency repair or malware cleanup. An audit of a broken site is a waste of your money.
- You have no website and no Google listing. There's nothing to audit yet. I no longer build websites, so I'll point you at someone who does.
- You want someone to run SEO every month. This is a one-off diagnostic, not a retainer. If you want ongoing search work, my partner Denote does that.
- You want a guaranteed number-one ranking. Nobody can sell you that. I'll tell you what's in your way; the market decides the rest.
Our site cormachassett.ie was essentially dormant, but the technical SEO and security audit completely revived it. The audit uncovered issues we didn't even know were holding us back, and the fixes made an immediate difference in performance and visibility.
They outlined a path forward to help us create content — then ranked for that content and increased traffic to the site. Our organic traffic has more than doubled.
Audit questions
What is a technical SEO audit?
A check of everything that decides whether search engines can find, read, trust and quote your site: crawlability, indexing, sitemaps, redirects, speed, mobile, structured data, titles, internal links and security. Mine also covers your Google Business Profile and whether your details match across the web, because for an Irish local business that matters as much as anything on the site itself.
How much does a technical SEO audit cost in Ireland?
Mine is €450, fixed. Across the market, one-off Irish audits run from roughly €500 to €3,000 and monthly retainers from about €800 upwards — I've written up what SEO actually costs in Ireland if you want the full picture before you spend anything.
Will this get my business into Google AI Overviews?
Nobody can promise that, and anyone who does is selling you something. What I can do is remove the reasons you're excluded: blocked AI crawlers, content that only exists after JavaScript runs, no quotable answer near the top of the page, missing structured data, and business facts that contradict each other. Those are the prerequisites. Being cited is then earned, not bought.
Do I have to hire you to do the fixes?
No, and that's deliberate. Fix it yourself, give it to your own developer, or ask me. The report is written to be actionable without a follow-up call.
How long does it take?
Three to five working days from getting read access to the site, the hosting and the Google Business Profile. The free 5-point check comes back inside one working day.
How long before I see results?
Technical fixes can land within days, because Google starts seeing pages it previously couldn't. Competitive rankings take months. For a local business, the Google Business Profile is usually where you feel it first.
What access do you need?
Read access to Google Search Console and your Google Business Profile, plus WordPress admin and hosting or FTP access if you want the on-server checks. If you don't have Search Console set up, I'll set it up as part of the audit.
My last SEO report was 60 pages and I did nothing with it.
I know. That's why this one is a prioritised list with evidence attached, ordered by what to do first. Length is not the deliverable.
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