Case study · Our own property
MatchMaker.lk: a marketplace ranking against newspaper classifieds
Marriage proposals in Sri Lanka are still largely a newspaper business, and the online competition is regional matrimony platforms with far bigger catalogues. A marketplace competing there has two problems that no amount of content marketing solves: most of its pages are thin by nature, and its audience is spread across five countries searching the same phrases.
The property at a glance
- Property
- MatchMaker.lk, our own marketplace
- Market
- Sri Lanka, plus diaspora in Australia, the Gulf, the UK and the US
- Category
- Matrimony and marriage proposals
- The problem
- Thin listing pages at scale, and demand spread across countries
- The site
- matchmaker.lk
The problem
The two problems a marketplace has in search
Neither is a content problem. Both are structural, which is why this property is a useful thing for us to own and work on.
Most pages are thin by nature
A listing is a handful of fields. Publish thousands and you have thousands of near-identical pages competing with each other, which is how a marketplace ends up with a crawl problem instead of a catalogue. The work is deciding which pages deserve to be indexed at all.
The audience is in five countries
A fifth of demand comes from outside Sri Lanka: Australia, the Gulf, the UK, the US. The same query returns a different result set in each, so average position is a blended figure that hides more than it shows, and the country split has to be read separately.
The incumbent is print
The category's centre of gravity is still the Sunday classifieds, and the queries reflect it. People search for the newspaper's proposals section by name. Ranking here means intercepting a habit, not just beating a website.
The work
What the work consists of
Marketplace SEO is mostly a set of decisions about what not to index, followed by making the pages that survive genuinely useful.
Deciding what deserves to be a page
The default for a marketplace is to publish everything and hope. The discipline is the opposite: index the pages that can answer a query, and keep the rest out of the way.
- Category and intent pages treated as the real landing pages, not individual listings
- Listing pages kept out of competition with the categories above them
- One canonical page per query rather than several near-duplicates
- Internal linking that makes the useful pages reachable in a couple of clicks
Writing for the query, not the category
The phrases people use are specific and unglamorous: free proposals, with a phone number, in Sri Lanka. The pages are built to match that language rather than industry language.
- Pages built on the actual phrasing, including the free and phone number qualifiers people add
- Editorial pages around the questions that surround a proposal, which is where the non-brand demand lives
- The brand query defended properly: matchmaker.lk sits at position 1.1 with a 60 per cent click-through rate
Treating the diaspora as its own market
A Sri Lankan family in Melbourne is searching for the same thing as one in Colombo, and getting a different result page. That is a separate targeting problem.
- Country performance read separately rather than as one blended average position
- Content written to be as useful abroad as at home, since the decision is often made across two countries
- Technical setup that does not accidentally geo-restrict the catalogue
The numbers
What it produces
Google Search Console for matchmaker.lk, the sixteen months to 12 August 2026. Bing keyword counts are Bing Webmaster Tools to 10 August 2026.
8,250
clicks from Google Search
Against 286,275 impressions, in the sixteen months to 12 August 2026.
531
queries inside the top ten
Of the top 1,000 exported, with 120 of those in the top three.
20%
of demand is diaspora
1,682 of 8,250 clicks come from outside Sri Lanka, across 184 other countries.
560
keywords in the top three on Bing
Of 2,190 tracked in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Where the clicks come from
Google Search Console, matchmaker.lk, clicks by country, the sixteen months to 12 August 2026.
The tail is the point. One in five clicks arrives from outside the country, which is why the blended average position for this site is a misleading number to manage against and the country breakdown is the one we actually work from.
See the figures as a table
| Item | clicks | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Sri Lanka | 6,568 | 79.6% of clicks |
| Australia | 235 | 2.8% |
| United Arab Emirates | 160 | 1.9% |
| United Kingdom | 157 | 1.9% |
| United States | 125 | 1.5% |
| Other, 180 countries | 1,005 | 12.2% combined |
Where the top 1,000 queries sit
Google Search Console, matchmaker.lk, average position across the sixteen months to 12 August 2026.
The long tail past position 20 is the honest part of this chart, and it is the marketplace problem showing up in the data: a catalogue generates queries faster than any team can build pages worth ranking for. It is also where the next year of work sits.
See the figures as a table
| Band | queries |
|---|---|
| Positions 1 to 3 | 120 |
| Positions 4 to 10 | 411 |
| Positions 11 to 20 | 162 |
| Position 21 or worse | 307 |
Screenshots
The site itself
The marketplace and its listing structure.
This is the property that teaches the least comfortable lesson of the four: on a marketplace, the SEO work is mostly restraint. Publishing everything is easy, and it is how sites like this end up with three hundred queries stranded past position 20.
Clients
Brands we work on
Client brands and our own properties, across healthcare, advertising, retail, interiors, software and community sites, in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and beyond. The portfolio separates the two.
Free, 15 minutes, no obligation
The method is the same whether we own the site or you do
Fifteen minutes with the person who would run your account. Useful if search is a large part of how customers find you, or if it should be and currently is not.
Prefer email? Write to [email protected].
What we cover on the call
- The problem as you see it, in your words first
- Where marketing is leaking: traffic, enquiries, follow-up or closing
- What you have already tried, and what came of it
- Which channel your margins and sales capacity can actually justify
- What a first engagement would need to cover, and roughly how long
- Straight answers to whatever you want to ask, on the call