Industries I Work With
Search behaviour isn’t the same across industries. A woman looking for bridal makeup in Kathmandu and a trekker in Germany researching Everest Base Camp are both “customers searching on Google,” but almost nothing about how they search, where they search, or what convinces them is the same. A salon lives or dies in the map pack. A trekking company never appears in it and doesn’t need to.
So rather than list twenty industries and claim expertise in all of them, this page covers seven: what the buying search looks like in each, and the specific bottleneck that usually keeps those sites from ranking. I’ve started with the one where I can show you the work rather than describe it, and I’m straight further down about which of the other six I’ve billed in and which I haven’t.
The seven at a glance
Cleaning and facility management
Reach customers searching for cleaning services in your city and turn local searches into enquiries.
Tour and Travel Agencies
Attract travellers searching for holiday packages, destinations and trusted travel agencies in Nepal.
Hotels and Resorts
Improve visibility for location-based searches and encourage more direct bookings through your website.
Beauty Salons
Help nearby customers find your salon on Google Search and Maps and book an appointment.
Real Estate
Connect with buyers searching for houses, land and apartments in the areas you serve.
E-commerce
Make your products and categories easier to find and turn relevant searches into online sales.
Trekking Companies
Reach international travellers searching for trekking routes, itineraries and experienced operators in Nepal.
Cleaning and facility management
This is the industry I can point at rather than talk about. United Facility Service, based in Aloknagar, Kathmandu, is a client of mine, and their site is a working example of the structure I recommend everywhere else on this page.
A facility company doesn’t sell one thing. UFS does carpet and sofa cleaning, tiles, glass, marble polishing, parquet polishing, janitorial work, industrial cleaning, house cleaning, painting, gardening, pest control, septic tank cleaning and chemical supply. Each of those is a different person with a different problem. Someone whose septic tank is backing up at 9pm isn’t the same buyer as an office manager comparing annual janitorial contracts, and a page written to satisfy both satisfies neither.
Most companies in this position build one page called “Our Services” and list everything on it. That page then competes for a dozen different searches and wins none of them, because a page about everything reads to Google as a page about nothing in particular. UFS has a separate page for each service instead — carpet cleaning at its own address, pest control at another — each with its own title and content written for that specific problem rather than for cleaning in general. You can click through and check.
The second thing that matters here is urgency. A good share of these searches are people with a problem happening right now, on a phone, who’ll call the first credible number they find. That makes the Google Business Profile, the visibility of the phone number, and how fast the page loads on mobile data worth more than almost any amount of content work.
The numbers from that engagement — what happened to traffic and enquiries — are on the SEO services page rather than repeated here.
Tour and travel agencies
Most of the money in a Kathmandu travel agency comes from Nepalis travelling out, not foreigners coming in. The searches reflect that: flight fares to Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, package tours to Thailand and Vietnam, visa processing questions, and a hard seasonal spike around Dashain, Tihar and the winter wedding months.
The bottleneck is the same one the cleaning example solves. A typical agency site has one page titled “Our Packages” listing fifteen destinations in a grid. Nothing on that site can rank for “Thailand tour package from Nepal,” because no page is about Thailand — the words are there, buried alongside fourteen other countries. Splitting that into a page per destination, each with the price in NPR, what is and isn’t included, departure months and a real itinerary, usually produces more movement than any amount of link building.
The second lever is the Google Business Profile, because a good share of these searches happen on a phone in Kathmandu and the map pack sits above everything else.
Read the detailed guide: SEO for tour and travel agencies in Nepal
Hotels and resorts
Hotels have a problem no other industry on this page has: their biggest competitor for their own name is a company they pay commission to. Try it yourself — search your hotel’s name and see what sits above your website. If Booking.com, Agoda or Trip.com is there, a guest who already decided to stay with you is being routed through a middleman, and you’re paying for the privilege. The same companies dominate the searches one step earlier: look up hotels in Pokhara and the first page is largely OTA listing pages rather than hotels.
That makes the first job unglamorous but valuable: win the branded search. A fully built Google Business Profile with current photos and rates, a homepage that loads fast enough to hold a phone user, and a direct-booking reason stated plainly on the page — a lower rate, free breakfast, free airport pickup, whatever’s true — moves bookings from commissioned to direct without needing a single new ranking.
Beyond that, the opportunity is in the searches with no brand attached: a resort near Kathmandu for a weekend, a hotel in Nagarkot with a mountain view, somewhere in Sauraha within walking distance of the jungle. Those need their own pages, with room-level detail and rates visible rather than hidden behind an enquiry form.
Read the detailed guide: SEO for hotels and resorts in Nepal
Beauty salons
This is the most local industry on the page and the one where the website matters least. Someone searching “hair salon near me” in Baneshwor or “bridal makeup Kathmandu price” is served a map pack first, and most of them never scroll past it. The ranking factors there are different from the rest of this page: distance, category selection, review count and recency, photo freshness, and whether the business name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear online.
So the work is mostly on the Google Business Profile, not the site. The right primary category before anything else, every service listed with its price, photos added regularly rather than once at setup, and a review process that keeps running so the flow never goes quiet for three months. A salon with three branches needs three separate profiles and three location pages — not one page listing three addresses, which is a common and expensive mistake.
This is also the industry where searching in Roman-Nepali matters most. “Kathmandu ma hair salon” and “bridal makeup ko rate” are real queries from real customers, and a keyword plan written only in English misses them entirely.
Real estate
Real estate has the longest decision cycle of the seven and the highest value per enquiry, which changes the strategy. Someone searching “land for sale in Bhaktapur” may take eight months to buy. You’re not trying to close them on the first visit; you’re trying to be the site they come back to.
The structural problem is that listings are temporary and rankings aren’t. A property page earns its position over months, the property sells, the page is deleted, and the ranking goes with it. The durable asset is the area page, not the listing. “Land for sale in Bhaktapur” should be a permanent page that outlives every individual plot listed on it, with listings feeding into it and sold properties marked sold rather than removed.
The other reality is that you’re competing with aggregators. Hamrobazar and the property portals usually win the broad query on sheer inventory. The winnable ground is narrower: a particular area, a particular property type, a particular budget band, written with local knowledge an aggregator can’t generate at scale.
Read the detailed guide: SEO for real estate businesses in Nepal
E-commerce
Every Nepali online store competes with Daraz for the same product searches, and Daraz usually wins on domain strength alone. The opening is that Daraz is generic. It can’t tell a buyer which model suits Kathmandu’s power supply, or answer a question specific to a category, or be trusted the way a specialist store can.
Three technical issues account for most of the lost traffic I see. Product descriptions copied from the manufacturer or supplier, which means hundreds of pages carrying text that already exists on fifty other sites. Filter and sort links generating thousands of near-identical URLs that drain the store’s crawl budget. And category pages that are pure product grids with no text at all, competing for the most valuable commercial keywords with nothing to say.
On the conversion side, two things that read as logistics are really ranking and conversion content in Nepal: whether cash on delivery is available, and exactly where delivery reaches — inside Ring Road, across the valley, outside it. Buyers search for both. Most stores bury them in a policy page.
Read the detailed guide: SEO for e-commerce websites in Nepal
Trekking companies
Trekking is the odd one out, and the reason it gets its own page rather than being folded into travel. The buyer isn’t in Nepal. She’s in Munich or Melbourne, researching six to nine months before she arrives, typing in English, and she’ll never see a map pack result for Kathmandu. Local SEO is close to irrelevant here. Everything else matters more.
Route-level pages are the foundation. Everest Base Camp, Annapurna Circuit, Manaslu, Upper Mustang and Langtang each deserve a full page with a day-by-day itinerary, the price in USD, what the permits cost and which ones are needed, the best months to go, and honest altitude and difficulty information. A single “Our Treks” page can’t rank for any of them.
Two technical points specific to this industry. Trekking sites are photo-heavy, and uncompressed mountain photography is the most common reason a page loads slowly for someone on the other side of the world. And the booking season runs ahead of the trekking season — the spring peak in March to May is decided in December and January, so the content has to be in place months before the traffic arrives.
Read the detailed guide: SEO for trekking companies in Nepal
Don't see your specific industry listed above?
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What transfers between industries, and what doesn't
I’d rather be straight about the limits of the list above. Cleaning and facility management is the sector I’ve delivered in longest. Outside that, my other sustained Nepali work has been with Global Karobar in wholesale trade, and there’s a driving school in Philadelphia that has nothing to do with any of this. The remaining five are industries I’ve researched closely and can argue about in detail, not ones where I can hand you a client to ring.
What carries across is the mechanical half of the job: fixing what stops a site being crawled and indexed, building a page structure that matches how people search, getting the Google Business Profile right, making pages load fast, and reading the data honestly afterwards. The page-per-service structure that works for a cleaning company is the same structure that works for fifteen tour destinations or five trekking routes. That doesn’t change with the industry.
What doesn’t carry across is domain knowledge — knowing that a trekking client’s spring season is sold in January, or that a salon’s real competitor is the one four hundred metres away rather than the one ranking nationally. I learn that from the client in the first few weeks, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims to arrive with it already.
If I haven't worked in your industry
There are three checks worth running on any SEO provider, wherever they’ve worked, and they’re on the SEO services page. This is the narrower question: how do you tell whether someone understands your sector rather than sectors in general? Two questions do most of the work.
- Ask them to name three searches your customers type. Not your service plus your city — three specific phrases, the kind a real person types with a real problem. If the answer is generic, they’ve looked at your industry rather than your customers.
- Ask what your seasonality is and how it changes the content schedule. Every industry on this page has one, and they’re all different: Dashain for travel, spring bookings decided in December for trekking, wedding season for salons. Someone who hasn’t thought about your calendar hasn’t thought about your business.
The longer version, covering how to read a proposal and what a fair contract looks like, is here: How to hire an SEO expert in Nepal.
Let’s Grow Your Business
Need more traffic, leads or sales? Tell me what you’re working on and I’ll recommend the right approach — SEO, Google Ads or website improvements.
Frequently asked questions
Do you only work with these seven industries?
No. These are the seven where I’ve either delivered work or done enough research to be useful from the first conversation. I’ve worked in wholesale trade as well, and I take on businesses outside the list when the problem is one I can solve. What I won’t do is quietly add your industry to this page and pretend it was always there.
You haven't worked in my industry before. Should that worry me?
It should make you ask harder questions, not walk away. Most of what I do on any project is industry-neutral: crawling and indexing, site structure, page speed, Google Business Profile, analytics. The industry-specific part is knowing what your customers search and when they search it, and I’d rather learn that from you in three weeks than pretend I already knew it. The two questions in the section above are the ones I’d use to test me.
Does the price change depending on my industry?
Not because of the industry name. It changes with the size of the site, how much is broken, and how competitive the searches are. A twelve-page salon site in one location and a trekking site with sixty route pages chasing international traffic are different amounts of work, and the quote reflects that rather than the sector. The tiers are published on the SEO services page — same figures wherever you are in Nepal.
Which of these industries is hardest to rank in?
E-commerce, because you’re competing with Daraz for product searches and losing on domain authority before you start. Travel is second, because the market’s crowded and the seasonal window is narrow. The most winnable are beauty salons and real estate — salons because the map pack is decided at neighbourhood level where a national competitor can’t reach you, and real estate because most firms in Nepal publish listings and nothing else, which leaves the area pages open.
How much of this is in Nepali rather than English?
It depends entirely on the industry, and it’s the thing most keyword plans get wrong. A trekking company’s customers search in English and almost nothing else, because they’re sitting in Europe. A salon, a cleaning company or a wholesaler is being searched for in English, Nepali script and Roman-Nepali all at once — “kathmandu ma hair salon” is a real query from a real customer. Getting this wrong in either direction wastes money: translating a trekking site into Nepali achieves nothing, and running a salon’s keyword plan in English only leaves a third of the market invisible to you.
How long before I see something?
It depends which lever moves. Google Business Profile work in a local industry like salons or cleaning can show up in weeks, because you’re improving a listing that already exists. Structural fixes — splitting a services page, fixing indexing, cutting page weight — usually show in one to three months. In a competitive Kathmandu category, meaningful organic gains normally land at four to six months. Building authority for international searches, which is what a trekking site needs, runs longer than that again. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is guessing.
My business doesn't have a website yet. Is SEO too early?
For a salon or a cleaning company, sometimes yes — a properly built Google Business Profile will bring you more calls in month one than a new website will, and the profile costs nothing. For e-commerce, real estate or trekking, the site is the product and there’s nothing to optimise without it. If you’re in the first group I’ll tell you to start with the profile and come back to the website later. If you’re in the second, the website design page covers how I build sites so they don’t need fixing afterwards.
Working together
Whichever industry you’re in, the engagement starts the same way. I audit what’s there, tell you what’s broken and what’s worth fixing first, and give you a written plan you could hand to another consultant if you decided not to work with me. If the audit says your problem isn’t search — and sometimes it isn’t — I’ll tell you that too.
From there it’s usually one of three routes: ongoing SEO where the goal is durable organic visibility, Google Ads where you need enquiries before SEO has had time to work, or a rebuild where the existing site is holding everything else back.
Talk to me about your sector
Tell me what you sell and where your customers are, and I’ll tell you honestly whether search is the right channel for it and what the first ninety days would look like. If I’m not the right fit, I’ll say so.
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