We spent three years telling clients their website needed to be fast, needed to say plainly what they do and where, needed the structured data that tells Google who they are.
And all the while, ours was quietly rotting.
A web design team whose own site doesn't rank for web design Dublin is the oldest joke in the trade, and we'd become it. So we rebuilt from scratch, and we're documenting the whole thing, warts and all, because the honest version is more useful to you than a case study where everything went to plan.
How it actually happens
Not through ignorance. We knew. We could have listed our own site's problems from memory, and occasionally did, usually on a Friday, usually to each other.
It happens because client work has a deadline and an invoice attached, and your own website has neither. Every single week there's something more urgent: a shop that's gone down, a launch date, someone's contact form silently swallowing enquiries. Our own site is the only project where we're both the client and the agency, and that client never once chased us.
So it drifts. Not dramatically. Nothing breaks. It just stops being true about your business, gets slower with each thing you bolt on, and stops matching what people are actually searching for. Three years pass and you're a web company that can't be found by anyone looking for a web company.
If you're a business owner reading this and feeling a bit called out, that's the point. We're not describing negligence. We're describing being busy, and if it happens to the people who do this for a living, it isn't a character flaw when it happens to you.
What we found when we finally looked
We ran the same inspection on ourselves that we'd run for any client. It wasn't pretty:
- It never really said what we do, or where. The word "Dublin" barely appeared on the site. Google can't rank you for a phrase your website doesn't actually mention, and we'd never mentioned it.
- It was slow. A page builder loading a pile of code we didn't need. Speed is a ranking factor, and ours was poor, especially on a phone.
- No structured data. Nothing told Google we were a Dublin business, what we charged, or the answers to the questions people were actually typing.
- Thin content. A few lines per page. Search engines, and the newer AI answer engines, reward pages that help. We had a brochure.
None of it was bad luck. It was the entirely predictable result of never being the client who gets prioritised.
What we changed
We rebuilt as fast, clean, hand-coded pages, then did the SEO properly instead of intending to.
We targeted the actual term
We built a dedicated Web Design Dublin page and put the phrase where it counts, the title tag, the main heading, the copy and the URL, written for humans first and search engines second. One clear page beats the phrase sprinkled randomly across ten.
We added structured data
We marked up LocalBusiness data, our Dublin address, opening hours and the area we serve, plus breadcrumbs and an FAQ, all in the JSON-LD format Google and AI tools read cleanly. It's the difference between hoping Google understands your business and telling it plainly.
We wrote for answer engines (AEO)
This is the new bit most Irish sites are missing. Tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity answer questions by quoting pages that give clear, direct answers. So we wrote real answers to real questions, like what a website costs in Dublin, in a format an AI can lift and cite accurately. Clear question, clear answer, no waffle.
We made it fast
No page builder, no unnecessary database calls, no bloat. The whole site is light and quick on a mid-range phone on mobile data, which is how most of Ireland actually browses.
The part that rarely gets said out loud
On-page work is only half the job. Ranking for a competitive local term like web design Dublin also needs the off-site signals:
- A complete, active Google Business Profile
- Genuine reviews from real clients
- Links from other reputable Irish websites
- Time, new pages rarely leap to the top in week one
We're doing that work too, in the open, and we'll update this post with the numbers as the rankings move. Some of it is slow and unglamorous, which is exactly why it got skipped the first time round.
What we changed about ourselves, not just the site
The rebuild was the easy part. Making sure we don't end up here again in three years is the harder one, so we did two things.
We put our own site in the schedule like a client. Booked time, a named date, the same as anyone who pays us. It's the only way it ever competes with work that has an invoice attached.
And we run our own Website NCT on it, the same twenty-point check we sell, because the whole reason that service exists is that nobody notices a site drifting from the inside. Including us. Especially us.
If this sounds familiar
Your website probably isn't broken. It's more likely just drifted, quietly, while you got on with running the business, and the fix is rarely a magic keyword or a monthly "SEO retainer" that produces nothing you can point at. It's a fast, well-structured site that clearly says what you do and where, backed by honest off-site work.
That's exactly what our Improve service is for, and our Care plans exist so it stops being the thing you'll get to eventually.
Want to know where your site actually stands today, without the sales pitch? Have a chat, or get a sense of scope from our estimator.