Case Study: A 108-Page Bilingual Website for a Krabi Home Extension Contractor, and Its First 4 Days on Google

Who this case is for

If you are a tradesperson or contractor outside the big cities, you get most of your work through word of mouth, you only have a Facebook page, and you wonder whether a website can really help local people find you, this case covers planning, building and launching the site, all the way to the first days of numbers from Google Search Console.

This case is different from our others, because it is a website we manage ourselves. That means we can share all the real numbers from Google Search Console, although we are not naming the website for now.

1. The brief: skilled tradespeople whom local customers could not find

The site belongs to a steel work and home extension team in Krabi province. The team has more than 30 years of combined experience and takes jobs across the whole province. There is no shopfront. The team visits job sites to give free assessments, and customers can choose a contract that includes materials or a labour-only contract.

Most customers come through word of mouth, so the website has two jobs:

• Let people who heard the name from someone they know find the team and check it out before deciding
• Let people searching for a tradesperson in the area find this site and then message on LINE or call

The measure of success for this site is the number of phone and LINE taps, not the number of visitors.

The competition before we started

Before writing the homepage, we looked at what people searching for a contractor in Krabi were finding:

• National contractor directories that create an identical page for every province, with no real work and no real address
• Facebook pages of local tradespeople. Most real tradespeople only have a page, not a website
• One-page online shops. Some run several websites with the same phone number

Our conclusion: we could win by being the real thing, and we must never build a site that looks like a doorway-page site ourselves.

2. What we built

22 service pages, based on the work the team really does

We started from the list of jobs the team actually takes on, then gave each one its own page: carports, roofs, awnings, cantilever roofs without posts, kitchen extensions, mezzanines, steel staircases, gates, window grilles, balcony floors, pavilions, all the way to agricultural greenhouses and roofs for shops or resorts.

We wrote rules into the brief from the start:

• No page for work the team does not do. Stainless steel work does not appear in any service page, page title or Schema, so the site does not attract the wrong customers
• No price-per-square-metre table, because the real price depends on the job site and that day’s material costs. The site only states starting points and the on-site assessment process
• No made-up information. Where information was not yet available, we put a clearly visible yellow “information needed” box instead of filling in made-up numbers

9 district pages that are not doorway pages

This is the riskiest part of any contractor website outside the big cities, because district pages that only swap the district name are what Google calls doorway pages.

We set a single test: remove the district name from two pages and read them side by side. If you cannot tell them apart, rewrite.

So each district page has its own content:

• Local conditions that affect the work. Coastal districts focus on salt air and rust protection; inland districts focus on heat under the roof and heavy rain
• The type of homes in the area. The provincial capital has housing estates with narrow side yards; outer districts have homes on large plots with room for multi-car carports
• Travel and booking an on-site assessment. The island district has a dedicated paragraph about the ferry crossing and travel costs
• A list of the real subdistricts, based on the official administrative boundaries
• The beach area is described accurately. It is a subdistrict within the provincial capital district, not a district in its own right

Work examples on district pages are pulled automatically based on where each job was really done. If a district has no work yet, the page shows work from nearby areas and states the real district of each job. We never present work from elsewhere as if it was done in that district.

English for foreigners who own homes in Krabi

Krabi has foreign residents who own homes and businesses. The team works in Thai, but has an admin who can answer LINE messages in English.

So the 51 English pages are not translations. We rewrote them so they read as if a local wrote them. The English articles cover different topics from the Thai ones, such as getting permission for home extensions as a foreigner. The language switch button leads to the same page in the other language, not back to the homepage.

No forms, just LINE and phone

Customers of local tradespeople add a LINE contact far more often than they fill in forms. So the site has no contact form at all. Every page has LINE and call buttons, there is a bottom bar with these two buttons on mobile at all times, and every tap is counted as an event in GA4.

Speed, privacy and notifying Google

• A strict PDPA cookie banner. Google Analytics does not load until the visitor accepts. The accept and decline buttons carry equal weight, and visitors can change their mind from the footer
• GA4 linked to Search Console, so Google search terms appear in the same report
• IndexNow submits all 106 URLs to Bing and the search engines that share its index, and notifies them again every time a page changes
• Internal links checked before every release: 108 pages, 0 broken links

3. Early results from Google

All the numbers in this section come directly from this site’s Google Search Console, not estimates from outside tools. At the time of writing, the site has been live for 6 days, and Search Console has data up to 16 September, which is day 4 after launch.

Google indexed almost every page within 4 days

Pages already appearing on Google

English pages started getting seen in the first week. The search terms Google showed included both “staircase contractor” and “รับทำครัวร้านอาหาร กระบี่” (restaurant kitchen builder Krabi), and people in several countries besides Thailand saw the site, such as the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and Singapore.

GA4 counts far fewer people than Search Console, because we set a strict cookie banner: people who do not accept are not counted. So we use Search Console to measure visibility, and GA4 to see whether visitors tap to call or message on LINE.

What real searches taught us: people type “ช่าง” (tradesman), not “รับทำ” (we build)

Six days after launch, we searched Google ourselves using words local customers would likely type, such as “ช่างต่อเติมบ้าน กระบี่” (home extension tradesman Krabi) and “ช่างทำหลังคา กระบี่” (roofer Krabi), and found the site was not yet in the first set of results.

The results at the top were not strong. Most were Facebook pages and one-page online shops, but almost all of them used the exact words customers type in their page titles, and the results page had a Map pack at the very top.

Ahrefs shows very little or no search volume for these terms, because they are local phrases that the tool does not fully capture. But local people really do search for them, and they are people who are ready to hire a tradesman.

So we updated all 22 service pages and all 9 district pages to use the patterns “ช่างทำ…กระบี่” (… builder Krabi) and “ช่างต่อเติมบ้าน + district” (home extension tradesman + district) in the page title, main heading and first sentence. The area-specific content of each page stayed the same.

Pushing pages in positions 8–15 onto page one

Pages at the bottom of page one or the top of page two are the easiest to move. We picked 11 pages in positions 8–15 and matched each with the most-searched term on that topic.

For each page we adjusted the title, main heading and description, rewrote the first paragraph to answer the question immediately, added 1–2 FAQs per page and added links from related pages. Then we asked Google to recrawl the pages through Search Console.

Expected results and what is still to do

The numbers in section 3 are real results from the first 4 days after launch (data as of 19 September 2026, 6 days after launch). The effect of the page title changes and the position 8–15 work will take 2–3 weeks to measure. We will come back and update this case with before-and-after numbers from Search Console.

Checklist for tradespeople and contractors outside the big cities

Open your website or page and answer each point.

Content

• Page titles use the words customers type, such as “roofer + province”, not just the service name
• Each type of work has its own page
• Each district page genuinely talks about that area: with the district name removed, you can still tell the pages apart
• You state clearly which jobs you do not take on
• There are no numbers you cannot back up, such as customer counts or price-per-square-metre figures you cannot actually honour
• There are photos of real work, stating which subdistrict each job was in

Technical and contact

• On mobile, visitors can tap LINE or call immediately from every page
• Your Google Business Profile has a name and phone number that match your website exactly, character for character
• You have submitted a sitemap to Search Console and checked that all pages are indexed
• If you use Google Analytics, you have a cookie consent banner

If you cannot tick more than half, local customers are probably still unable to find you.

Questions tradespeople often ask us

I already have a Facebook page. Do I need a website too? A page helps with word of mouth, but people searching for a tradesperson on Google usually see websites and the map listings first. A website is also where people who heard your name from someone they know can check your credibility: your work, your process and the areas you cover.

How long after building a website will it show on Google? This site started appearing on Google within 3 days of launch, and Google indexed almost every page within 4 days. But reaching the top positions for competitive terms usually takes several weeks to several months.

Should I make a page for every district? Yes, if you really work in every district and write each page to be genuinely different. If you only swap the district name, customers will immediately see it is a doorway page, and it is risky with Google too.

Should I put prices on my website? Only what you can really stand behind, such as starting points or deposit terms. If the real price depends on the job site, explaining how you price and how to book an on-site assessment is more credible than a price table you cannot actually use.

We build websites and SEO for local businesses like this

If you are a tradesperson, contractor or service business outside the big cities and want local people to find you on Google, start with a free website audit, or see our web development services and SEO services.