Set your goals and record a baseline

Choose the queries

Write down the words a customer types when they want what you sell and do not know you exist. For most Dublin businesses that is the service and the place, in a few forms: “plumber Dublin 9”, “emergency plumber near me”, “plumber Drumcondra”. Six to twelve queries is enough to start. Ignore your own business name; people who search it have already found you. Ignore queries that describe what you would like to sell rather than what you do.

Google Search Console, which is free and which the technical chapter shows how to set up, lists the queries your site already appears for. It will confirm some of your list and add ones you had not thought of.

Choose the area

The map pack ranks partly on distance from the searcher, so “appearing for plumber Dublin” is not one thing; it is a pattern across the city. Decide where your customers are. A shop's area is the streets around it. A tradesperson's area is the districts they will drive to. A solicitor's may be the whole county. Write it down as a list of districts or a radius, because the measurement chapter will check visibility from several points inside it and nowhere outside.

Choose the outcomes

Rankings are not outcomes. Calls, enquiries, bookings, orders and direction requests are. Decide which of those your business runs on and how you will count them. The tracking chapter sets up the counting; this chapter only asks you to name what counts, so that in six months you can say whether the work paid for itself rather than whether a number on a chart went up.

Record where you are

Four things, on one page, with today's date:

• For each target query, whether the business appears in the map pack and in the organic results when searched from its own address, and roughly where. A phone in a private window, standing at the door, is a fair first instrument.
• The last three months of organic clicks and impressions from Search Console, if the site is already verified there.
• The last three months of calls and enquiries, from whatever records exist, and where they came from if known.
• The current state of the Google Business Profile: claimed or not, verified or not, rating and review count, last post date.

Illustrative example. A physiotherapy clinic in Rathmines chooses eight queries, sets its area as Dublin 6, 6W, 8 and 12, decides that bookings through the website and calls from the profile are the outcomes that count, and records that on the day of the baseline it appears in the map pack for two of the eight queries from its own door and none from Kimmage. That is a description of the exercise, not a client result.

Why this comes first

Because every later chapter changes something, and a change without a baseline cannot be attributed. It also stops the commonest failure in local SEO, which is working on queries that do not bring customers. If the baseline is honest, the monthly routine later has something to compare against, and the hiring chapter has something to hand a company on day one.