Case study · Wellness · Rawai, Phuket
A spa everyone liked, that nobody could find.
Evergreen Spa had a 4.7-star rating from 72 reviews before Aroc arrived. That reputation is theirs. It was earned over years of doing good work on people who walked past. What they did not have was any way for someone searching online to discover the place existed.
120
searches Evergreen appears in
23 in month one, none before that
1,673
times shown in results
552 in month one
21
clicks from Google
8 in month one — still a small number
86
engaged visits
40 in month one, on fewer total visits
01 · The constraint
Reputation was never the problem.
Most spas with a visibility problem also have a quality problem. Evergreen did not. The reviews were strong, the customers who found it came back, and roughly half of them were Thai residents rather than tourists — which is the harder audience to win and the one that does not disappear in low season.
The constraint was the earliest one in the Growth System: Discoverable. A business that cannot be found cannot be chosen, and nothing further along the chain matters until that is fixed.
What Aroc did not do: create the reviews, the rating, or the customer base. Those existed. The work was making an existing good business findable by people who did not already know it was there.
02 · What was built
A site that loads fast and books on WhatsApp.
Nine pages: a home page, one for each of the four treatments, plus services, reviews, about and contact. Built mobile first, because 70% of Evergreen’s bookings arrive by message and almost all of its search traffic is on a phone.
Every page opens a WhatsApp conversation in one tap rather than asking for a form submission — matching how the business already takes bookings instead of asking it to change.
Visit evergreenwellnessphuket.comOpens the live site. Check any of it against what is written here.
03 · What happened
First place for three searches, in the first month.
The site went live at the start of July. By the end of the reporting period it appeared in 23 distinct searches, having appeared in none at the start.
| What people searched | Position | Status |
|---|---|---|
| good spa near me | 1 | Page 1 |
| spa rawai phuket | 1 | Page 1 |
| อบสมุนไพร ใกล้ฉัน — herbal steam near me | 1 | Page 1 · Thai |
| ice bath near me | 3 | Page 1 |
| cold plunge sauna near me | 5 | Page 1 |
| sauna rawai | 10 | Page 1 |
| phuket ice bath | 20 | Page 2 |
| rawai spa | 42 | Needs work |
The caveat, in the report's own words:“Being number 1 for a search nobody makes yet is a good sign, not yet a result. The volume comes later.” Three first-place rankings on low-volume searches is a real signal about whether the approach works. It is not yet money in the till, and it was not presented as such.
04 · What did not work
Eight visits. That is a small number.
552 appearances produced 8 visits from Google. Aroc would rather say that plainly than dress it up, and it was the first thing in the client’s report, not a footnote.
The wellness page was answering the wrong question
Shown 191 times. Zero clicks. Google was matching it to people searching “wellness resort in rawai phuket” — people looking for somewhere to sleep. Evergreen is a day spa, so they scrolled straight past. That single search accounted for 256 of the 552 total appearances.
Fixing it will make the headline number go down, and the client was told so before it happens. 200 people who might book is worth more than 550 who never will.
Three pages were competing with each other
For “rawai spa” — an exact-offer search shown 51 times a month — the wellness page, the home page and the massage page all competed. Google resolved it by ranking none of them well: all three sat between position 42 and 55. This was self-inflicted and is being consolidated into one page.
Desktop performance was far worse than mobile
Average position 13 on phones against 46 on computers, with 351 desktop appearances producing zero clicks. Diagnosed, not yet solved — it is in the Month 2 work.
Enquiries could not be counted at all
Month 1 could report visits but not contacts, because tracking was not installed. Reporting a number Aroc could not stand behind was not an option, so the report said so and the tracking became the first item of Month 2.
05 · Month two
Three times the visibility, and a mistake that cost a month.
Second reporting month, 28 July to 27 August. Google showed the site 1,673 times against 552, across 120 different searches against 23. Clicks went from 8 to 21.
Total visits went down — 160 against 195 — and that is not a contradiction. The visits that disappeared were people who arrived and left immediately. Visits where someone actually engaged with the page more than doubled, from 40 to 86, taking the engagement rate from 21% to 54%.
Contact buttons were tapped 12 times. That measurement did not exist before, and it is the number the previous report could not answer. What Aroc still cannot see is what those taps became — a message, a booking, or nothing. That is stated in the client’s report in the same words.
The mistake, in full
Month one identified that three pages were competing with each other for “rawai spa”. In August Aroc tried to fix it, chose the wrong page to consolidate onto, and added six internal links pointing at it — pushing the signal away from the home page, which was already the stronger page for that search. The problem got worse, not better.
The cost is measurable. Three pages sharing “rawai spa”: 269 appearances, zero clicks, all three at position 44. The same search phrased “spa rawai”, where one page owns it on its own: position 7, and a click. Same business, same customer — page five when three pages share it, page one when one page owns it.
It was fixed on 1 September, and the reason it went unfixed for a month is recorded rather than glossed: the check that would have caught it did not exist until this month. It runs before every report now — any search matching two or more pages is a finding, whether or not it is new.
Still wrong: a third of the audience cannot buy
“Wellness resort in rawai phuket” produced 321 appearances and zero clicks — 35% of everything the site was shown for, and up from 256 last month. Those people want a hotel room. Evergreen is a day spa.
The prediction attached to fixing it: the headline number should fall by 300 to 400 next month. That is the fix working. Judge month three on clicks, not on the total.
The Thai pages, at their real size
Three Thai-language pages went live on 8 August. In roughly 20 days they earned 34 appearances and one click. That is small and is not being dressed up. What is worth noting is where they sit: the main Thai page ranks at position 5.3, against 19.7 for the English home page. New pages do not normally arrive on page one.
The honest arithmetic: 1,673 appearances producing 21 clicks is a click rate of 1.26%, slightly lower than month one’s 1.45%. The percentages on this page are large because the starting numbers were small. Two months is early — search results take three to six months to settle, so the direction means something and the size of any single number does not, yet.
05 · What comes next
The constraint has moved.
Discoverable is largely solved — Google knows the site exists and ranks it for real searches. The constraint is now Converting: 552 appearances producing 8 visits is a click-through problem, not an indexing one.
Month 2 consolidates the competing pages, strengthens the ice bath page for the phrasing people actually use, publishes Thai-language pages — almost half of Evergreen’s customers are Thai and one Thai search already ranks first — and installs enquiry tracking so Month 3 can report contacts rather than visits.
Reported monthly, in this format, whether or not it went well. The Month 1 report led with what was not working. This page does the same, because a case study that only shows the wins is an advertisement.
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