What Google Wants on Your Business Website

There's a whole industry built around "SEO" - search engine optimisation - that makes it sound incredibly complicated and expensive. People will charge you hundreds of euro a month for SEO services, throw around terms like "backlinks" and "domain authority", and make the whole thing feel like dark magic.

For a local business in Ireland - a pub, a cafe, a plumber, a B&B - most of that is unnecessary. Here's what actually matters, in plain English.

1. Your Business Name, Address, and Phone Number

This sounds obvious, but it's the single most important thing. Google needs to know what your business is called, where it is, and how to contact it. This information should be clearly visible on your website - not hidden in a footer that's barely readable, but right there, easy to find.

The name, address, and phone number on your website should exactly match what's on your Google Business Profile. If your website says "Main Street, Carrick-on-Shannon" but Google Business says "Main St, Carrick on Shannon", that mismatch can actually confuse Google. Keep them identical.

2. Your Opening Hours

Google loves showing opening hours in search results. When someone searches for "cafe open now near me", Google checks the hours it has for local businesses and shows the ones that are currently open. If your hours aren't on your website (or your Google Business Profile), you won't show up for those searches.

Keep them accurate. If your hours change seasonally or for bank holidays, update them. Out-of-date hours don't just annoy customers who show up to a locked door - they tell Google your information might not be reliable.

3. A Mobile-Friendly Website

Over 70% of local searches happen on phones. Google knows this, and since 2019 they've used "mobile-first indexing" - meaning they look at the mobile version of your website first when deciding how to rank it.

If your website is hard to use on a phone - tiny text, buttons you can't tap, content that spills off the screen - Google will rank it lower. A clean, fast mobile experience isn't a nice-to-have. It's the baseline.

4. Fast Loading

Google measures how fast your site loads, and it matters. Not in a "shave off 20 milliseconds" way, but in a "does the page take 8 seconds to load because of a massive uncompressed photo?" way.

The main culprits for slow websites are oversized images, too many fonts loading from external servers, and cheap hosting. Get your images optimised (modern formats like WebP, reasonably sized), host your fonts locally instead of loading them from Google, and use decent hosting. That alone puts you ahead of most small business sites.

5. A Proper Page Title and Description

When you search for something on Google, each result shows a blue title and a short description underneath. Those come from your website's code - specifically the "title tag" and "meta description".

Your title should include your business name and what you do. "Murphy's Plumbing - Emergency Plumber in Sligo" is far better than just "Home" or "Welcome to Our Website". The description should be a sentence or two that tells people what they'll find - think of it as the line that convinces someone to click.

6. Google Business Profile (Free, and Crucial)

If you do nothing else after reading this, set up a Google Business Profile. It's free, it takes about 20 minutes, and it's the single biggest thing you can do to appear in local search results and on Google Maps.

Claim your business, add your hours, upload some photos, and link your website. Google uses this profile to show your business in the map results that appear at the top of local searches - the ones with the map and three businesses listed. That's prime real estate, and having a Google Business Profile is how you get there.

7. Content That Actually Helps People

Google's job is to show people the most useful result for their search. For a local business, "useful" means answering the questions people actually have. Do you serve food? What kind? What are your prices? Where exactly are you? Do you have parking? Are you wheelchair accessible?

You don't need to write essays. A clear menu page, an accurate hours section, a line about parking - that's content that helps people, and Google rewards it.

What Doesn't Matter (as Much as People Think)

A few things that the SEO industry likes to push, but that barely matter for a local business:

• Blogging. A blog can help, but only if you actually write useful things and keep it updated. An abandoned blog from 2022 does nothing.
• Meta keywords. Google has ignored these since 2009. If someone is charging you to add keywords, they're wasting your money.
• Social media links. Having Facebook and Instagram links on your site is fine, but it doesn't directly affect your Google ranking.
• Fancy animations. Google doesn't care if your website has parallax scrolling or animated text. It cares if the content is useful and the site loads fast.

The Short Version

Put your name, address, phone number, and hours on your website. Make sure it works on phones. Make sure it loads fast. Set up a Google Business Profile and link your website to it. Write a decent page title and description. That's 90% of what matters for a local business in Ireland.

Everything else is fine-tuning. Get those basics right first, and you'll already be ahead of most of your competitors - because most of them haven't done even this much. And if you want to understand what people actually see when they search for your business, that's worth reading too.