Websites · Thai market

Real estate website optimization in Thailand — what actually moves enquiries

Most advice about website optimization is written for English-language markets and stops at page speed. A Thai agency site loses enquiries somewhere else: in the way Thai text is measured, in which language Google is allowed to serve, and in the gap between a contact form and the app buyers actually use.

1. Thai text truncates earlier than your character count says

A search result title is cut by pixel width, not by how many characters you typed. In English the two roughly track each other. In Thai they do not, and the gap runs in both directions.

Thai stacks vowels and tone marks above and below the base consonant. Those marks are separate Unicode codepoints but occupy no horizontal width. A word like เดี๋ยว counts as six codepoints and draws about four characters wide. Any tool that budgets your title by counting characters will therefore let a Thai title run past the pixel budget and get cut mid-word in the result page.

The correction is to count only the characters that actually take width — everything except the combining marks in the ranges U+0E31, U+0E34–U+0E3A and U+0E47–U+0E4E. Two ranges are commonly included by mistake: า (U+0E32) and ำ (U+0E33) are full-width letters, not marks. Counting them as marks under-counts the string and lets it run long — the opposite failure.

If you maintain Thai and English titles in the same CMS, this is worth checking before anything else. It is invisible in your admin panel and only shows in the SERP.

2. Two languages without hreflang is one language

Thai agencies almost always publish in Thai and English. Without hreflang annotations, Google treats the two versions as candidates for the same slot and picks one — usually the one with more links, which is usually English. Your Thai page then competes with your own English page instead of ranking for Thai queries.

Three rules make it work:

• Every page declares both alternates and itself. A page that lists only the other language is a broken pair.
• Use th and en, not th-TH and en-TH, unless you genuinely serve different content to Thailand and elsewhere.
• The canonical of the Thai page points at the Thai page. Pointing both canonicals at the English version deletes the Thai page from the index.

This is a five-minute fix that is wrong on a large share of Thai agency sites, and it is the difference between two indexed pages and one.

3. The enquiry has to land where the buyer already is

A contact form asks the visitor to type an email address and wait. In Thailand the buyer is already in LINE — it is where they message their agent, their bank, and their friends. Every step between "interested" and "talking to someone" costs enquiries, and switching apps is a large step.

What works in practice on a Thai property site:

• A LINE Official Account button on the listing page, not only in the footer.
• The listing reference carried into the conversation, so the agent knows which unit opened the chat without asking.
• An answer outside office hours. A buyer browsing at 11pm who gets a reply at 10am the next morning has already messaged two other agencies.

Keep the form for the visitors who prefer it. Just stop making it the only door.

4. If the listing only lives on a portal, the portal ranks

Publishing to DDproperty, Hipflat and Thailand-Property is distribution, and it works. But a listing that exists only there means the portal owns the page that ranks, the enquiry, and the relationship. The portal is not doing anything wrong — it simply has the page.

An agency site earns its own rankings when each listing has a page on the agency domain that is genuinely different from the portal's: the neighbourhood context the portal template has no field for, the ownership and quota status, the building's actual management, photographs that are not the developer's renders. Syndicate the same listing outward, but keep an owned page that says more.

This is also the only version of the arrangement where the enquiry arrives in your CRM rather than in a portal's inbox.

5. Then, page speed

Speed matters — it is simply not the first problem. Two details are specific to Thai sites:

• Thai fonts are heavy. Noto Sans Thai and its siblings carry large glyph sets. Subset them and self-host, and load only the weights you actually use; a single unused weight can cost more than every image on the page.
• Property photography is the payload. Serve WebP or AVIF, size for the container rather than the original, and lazy-load anything below the fold. A listing gallery is usually the entire performance budget.

Measure on a mid-range Android phone on 4G, not on your laptop. That is the device most of your visitors are holding.

What to check this week

1. Open Search Console, filter to Thai queries, and look at which page Google actually serves. If your homepage answers a query that a deeper page covers better, that page needs internal links — not new content.
2. Verify hreflang is reciprocal on ten pages, including the homepage.
3. Re-measure your Thai titles by advanced width, not character count.
4. Count the clicks between a listing page and a message reaching a human.

None of these require a redesign. They are the four things that most often separate a Thai agency site that gets found from one that does not.