Case study · Our own website
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.
MatchMaker.lk is Web Wonder Works' own Sri Lankan marriage proposals site. In the sixteen months to 12 August 2026, Google sent it 8,250 visitors and showed it in results 286,275 times. It reaches the first page for 531 of its top 1,000 searches, and a fifth of everyone who arrives is Sri Lankan living abroad.
The site at a glance
- Website
- 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. Open the site
The problem
The two problems a marketplace has in search
Neither is a content problem. Both are structural, which is why this site 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 mess Google cannot read instead of a catalogue. The work is deciding which pages deserve to be listed in Google 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 search returns a different result set in each, so average ranking 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 searches 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 search, 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 single main page per search rather than several near-duplicates
- Internal linking that makes the useful pages reachable in a couple of clicks
Writing for the search, 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 demand from people who never searched our name lives
- The brand search defended properly: matchmaker.lk sits at ranking 1.1 with a 60 per cent click 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 single average ranking
- 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 search term counts are Bing Webmaster Tools to 10 August 2026.
8,250
visits from Google
Against 286,275 appearances, in the sixteen months to 12 August 2026.
531
searches 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.
5,610
appearances inside Google's AI features
Google Search Console's Generative AI report, from 18 May 2026. The homepage takes 4,895 of them, which is where demand from people who never searched our name lands.
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 single average ranking 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 searches sit
Google Search Console, matchmaker.lk, average ranking across the sixteen months to 12 August 2026.
The long tail past ranking 20 is the honest part of this chart, and it is the marketplace problem showing up in the data: a catalogue generates searches 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 | searches |
|---|---|
| Ranked 1 to 3 | 120 |
| Ranked 4 to 10 | 411 |
| Ranked 11 to 20 | 162 |
| Ranked 21 or worse | 307 |
The searches that earn the most
Google Search Console, matchmaker.lk, the sixteen months to 12 August 2026.
| Search | Clicks | Times shown | Click rate | Typical ranking |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| malith perera age | 343 | 11,993 | 2.86% | 8.04 |
| free marriage proposals with phone number | 184 | 2,180 | 8.44% | 5.03 |
| matrimony sri lanka | 159 | 6,023 | 2.64% | 6.44 |
| matchmaker.lk | 146 | 242 | 60.33% | 1.09 |
| free marriage proposals sri lanka | 132 | 1,329 | 9.93% | 5.90 |
| marriage proposals | 130 | 6,132 | 2.12% | 10.85 |
The brand row is the tell: 60.33 per cent click-through at ranking 1.09, which is what a defended brand term looks like. Everything above it is demand from people who never searched our name, and the qualifiers people add, free and with phone number, are the language the pages had to be written in.
Where these numbers come from
The consoles the figures came from
Five views. The Google performance report carries the totals quoted above, and the two AI reports show a marketplace being used as a source in answers, which is newer ground for this category.
Google Search ConsolePerformance, Search type: Web
8.25K total clicks, 286K appearances, 2.9% average click rate, average ranking 10.4. The date axis runs from 11 April 2025.
Date range shown: 16 months
Google Search ConsolePerformance, Generative AI features (Beta)
5.61K appearances inside Google's generative AI features, of which the homepage takes 4,895.
Date range shown: 16 months selected, data from 18 May 2026
Bing Webmaster ToolsAI Performance, citation sources: Microsoft Copilots and Partners
3.8K quotes in total, average 2 pages quoted. Bing labels this report a sample of overall activity.
Date range shown: 6 months
Google Search ConsolePerformance, searches tab
The table of searches behind the ranking bands, including the brand term at ranking 1.1.
Date range shown: 16 months
Bing Webmaster ToolsSearch Performance
The same site on Bing, where 560 of 2,190 tracked search terms sit in the top three.
Date range shown: Bing's own window
Google and Bing are never added together anywhere on this page, and the two AI reports are not comparable with each other either.
The site itself
The site itself
More of the marketplace and its listing structure. Each one opens full size.
The same method is set out service by service on our SEO services page, with the technical, content and local scope and how each one is measured. This page is what it looks like applied to a site we own.
This is the site 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 searches stranded past ranking 20.
Clients
Brands we work on
Client brands and our own websites, 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