The visitors who will
grow your business

There is a question we put to every new client, and I want to put it to you now.

How do you think people find you online?

And nearly everybody says the same thing. They search for our name.

And that is true, as far as it goes. The people who already know you, or who were told about you by a cousin or a neighbour or somebody they met at breakfast, will absolutely look you up by name. They know what they are looking for.

But those visitors were already yours. Most of them were coming anyway.

The ones who will actually grow your business are the people who do not know you exist. They are sitting in a house in Germany, or Perth, or Ohio, planning a trip to Ireland, and they have never heard your name in their lives. They could not type it if they wanted to.

So they type what they want instead.

Kayaking west cork. Best things to do in Dingle. Guided history tour Kerry. Family day out Clare. Something for a rainy day in Mayo.

That is how new people find you. If they find you at all.

Nobody types your name the first time.

They type what they are looking for.

So the question to ask about your website is not whether people can find it when they search for you. Of course they can. The question is whether they can find it when they search for what you do. Those are two completely different things, and most websites in this country are only built to handle the first one.

Now, here is the good news, and it is real good news for nearly everybody listening.

For local tourism searches in Ireland, you are not up against the whole internet. You are up against the handful of businesses in your own area doing something like what you do. And in fairness, a lot of them have tired websites, thin content, and no plan at all for being found. A well-built site with real content on it gives you a genuine advantage over that, and it is the kind of advantage that keeps paying.

Google is looking for the most relevant, most specific, most credible answer to whatever was typed in. If you have a page that answers the question of what there is to do outdoors in Dingle better than anybody else in Dingle answers it, you will show up for it. That is a realistic ambition for most Irish tourism businesses. And unlike an advert, it keeps working long after you have stopped thinking about it.

Let me give you a concrete example, because this is where it becomes obvious.

Take a tour operator with one page called Our Tours. Everything they do is on it, three or four paragraphs, a few photos at the bottom. That page will not rank for much of anything, because it is not really about any one thing.

Now take the same operator with a page for each experience. One for the coastal walk. One for the evening kayak. One for the family archaeology day. Each with its own description, its own photographs, its own few questions and answers, its own sense of place.

Same business. Same experiences. Same people, same boat, same stretch of coast. Completely different visibility.

That is what we mean when we say the key to all of this is being specific. Each specific page catches a specific search. Each specific search brings in somebody looking for exactly that thing, which means they arrive already interested. The more specific you are, the more of those people you pick up.

And there is a whole second layer to this that most operators never think about, which is the questions.

Because people do not only search for things. They search for problems. What to do in Kerry when it is raining. Is the Cliffs of Moher walk suitable for a seven year old. Things to do in limerick in November. Somewhere to bring my parents that is not too much walking.

Those searches are enormously valuable, because the person typing them has a specific worry and is looking for somebody to take it away. And they are far less contested than the obvious searches, because almost nobody writes for them.

So if you know that half the emails landing in your inbox are people asking whether it is suitable for children, or whether it goes ahead in the rain, or whether there is anywhere to leave a bag, then you already know what to write. Answer it properly on your website, in a few honest paragraphs, using the same words people use when they ask you.

You will find you are one of very few businesses in the country who bothered. And the person who finds that answer arrives already trusting you, because you solved their problem before you ever met them.

Your inbox is the best keyword research you will ever get, and you are already paying for it.

Now, search engines are not the only place this happens anymore. People find experiences on Instagram. They fall down a hole on TikTok and end up booking a thing they had never heard of an hour earlier. They read a recommendation on a forum. They ask one of the AI tools to plan them four days in the west and take whatever it says. Some of your best visitors next year will arrive from a direction you never thought about.

But every one of those roads leads somewhere. And the somewhere needs to be your website.

Your website is the hub. It is where interest turns into intention. Where somebody stops looking and starts booking. Without it doing that job properly, you are living entirely on platforms you do not own and cannot control. Algorithms change. Platforms rise and fall and get bought and ruined. Your website is yours.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Open a private browsing window, so your own history does not flatter you, and search for what you offer without using your business name. Use the words a stranger would actually use. Where do you come up? If you are nowhere on the first page for anything relevant, you have a visibility problem, and now at least you know the size of it.

The second. Look at the pages on your website and ask whether any of them is dedicated to one specific thing. One activity, one experience, one place. If it is all living on a single page, then splitting it up is the single most useful structural change available to you. Each experience deserves its own page. Each place deserves its own words.

And the third. Check your Google Business Profile. Is it claimed? Is the information right? Are there recent photographs and recent reviews on it? For local searches, that listing can be doing as much work as your entire website, and it costs nothing but attention.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

Your website is not a brochure for people who already know you. It is your first hello to the people who do not.

Every page on it is either helping a stranger find you or it is not.

And they are out there this evening, searching for exactly what you do, in exactly the place you do it. The only question is whether your website is the answer they land on.

That is the opportunity. And it is bigger than most people realise.