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Bangkok breaks the standard local SEO playbook in one specific way: nobody navigates by street address. They navigate by station. Optimising a Bangkok venue means understanding that “near BTS Thong Lo” is the search, and that the address on your profile is almost decoration.
Key takeaways
Bangkok addresses are genuinely hard to use. Sois branch off sois, numbering is not sequential, and the same soi can be known by two names. So people stopped using addresses. They locate everything relative to the nearest BTS or MRT station, and they search that way too: “ramen near Phrom Phong”, “rooftop Asok”, “brunch Ari”.
That single fact reshapes the whole strategy. A venue that puts its station in the title, the H1, the profile description and the directions block is answering the query as it is actually typed. A venue that leads with its soi address is answering a question nobody asked.
Both, and for genuinely different audiences. English reaches visitors and the expat trade. Thai reaches a domestic market that is larger, spends year-round rather than seasonally, and is almost entirely uncontested by venues that publish in English only.
The mistake is machine-translating one into the other. Thai search behaviour is not a translation of English search behaviour — the phrasing, the dish names and the way people describe a venue all differ. If you can only do one properly, do the one your covers actually come from, and do it well.
“Your English page and your Thai page are not the same page in two languages. They are two pages for two different customers.”
Search your own restaurant name in Bangkok and you will often find GrabFood, LINE MAN and foodpanda ranking above your own website. They have vastly more domain authority than you will ever have, and they are bidding on your brand.
You will not outrank them on your own name through content. What you can do is own the profile they cannot touch: your Google Business Profile sits above the organic results entirely, and it links where you tell it to. Point it at your own booking flow, keep the hours accurate, and the aggregator listing becomes the second thing people see rather than the first.
The same logic applies to reservations. Renting your booking flow from a marketplace means paying commission on a guest who searched for you by name. Owning it is the difference — the reasoning is the same one we set out in what a restaurant website costs.
83% of consumers read Google reviews for local businesses, and 88% would consider a business that answers all of them against 47% for one that answers none (BrightLocal, 2025). Bangkok adds a wrinkle: your reviews arrive in Thai, English, Mandarin and Japanese, and replying in kind is both a ranking signal and a visible courtesy to the next reader.
LINE is the channel that matters for follow-up. Putting a LINE Official Account link on the site does more for repeat bookings than a contact form will, because it is where the conversation already happens. A form is a channel you are asking someone to adopt; LINE is one they already have open.
More than it does in Europe. If your site takes longer than three seconds on a phone, 53% of visitors leave (Google / Think with Google, 2024) — and a large share of Bangkok’s dining decisions are made on mobile data, on a train, between stations, with about ninety seconds of attention.
Target a menu that opens without a click, a booking button above the fold, a tappable number, and the station name visible without scrolling. A stock theme carrying a slider and four font families will lose that ninety seconds before it renders. The longer version of that argument is in why a template website is costing your restaurant bookings.
We have delivered work in Bangkok and build hospitality software for venues across Asia — profile, fast site, local SEO and direct booking as one package.
Book an intro callFrequently asked questions
The station, and put it everywhere — title, H1, profile description, directions. Bangkok addresses are genuinely difficult to use, so people search by the nearest BTS or MRT stop instead. Keep the address accurate for Maps, but do not expect it to bring you traffic.
If any meaningful share of your covers are domestic, yes. The Thai-language market is larger and less seasonal than the visitor market, and most English-only venues never compete for it. Write it properly rather than machine-translating — Thai search phrasing is not a translation of English phrasing.
You mostly do not, on organic results — they have far more domain authority. What you do own is your Google Business Profile, which sits above organic entirely. Point it at your own booking flow and keep it current, and the aggregator becomes the second result rather than the first.
Completely, and Phuket is really five markets: Patong, Kata, Kamala, Bang Tao and Old Town, each with a different guest and a different season. A single Phuket page competes with the whole island; an area page competes with a handful of venues.
We are an Amsterdam studio and have delivered work in Bangkok, alongside a hospitality client base across Bali. The build and communication run remotely, and we travel for the parts that need to happen in the room.
