Capymapa is a multilingual guide to Pattaya: a curated map, live baht exchange rates, a songthaew route planner and articles. I came up with it, designed it and launched it from scratch. Traffic grew from 73 visits in May to 3,256 in September — almost all of it from search.
Data as of 21 October 2026: Yandex Metrica and Google Search Console.
Monthly visits growth: 73 in May → 3,256 in September
Of traffic comes from search: 6,910 of 7,969 visits since 1 August
Pages indexed by Google. In mid-August it was 85
Google clicks in 3 months from 49.1K impressions
Place pages in two languages: 100 RU + 87 EN, 16 categories
Average time on site, bounce rate of 23%
From an empty site to 120 visits a day.
Russian-speaking tourists and expats in Pattaya piece information together from chats and old posts. The songthaew fare rose to 15–20 baht, yet plenty of material online still says 10, and exchange rates are "a feeling". I built a curated map: not a catalogue of everything, but places checked in person. The strategy: one pain, one audience, and a "regular guy" as the face of the brand.
A catalogue of places retains nobody — answers to daily questions do. I built two tools: a live exchange-rate comparison and a songthaew route planner with GPS. Rates refresh on the server on a schedule, pass a plausibility check, and a failure sends a Telegram alert. The map reads a prebuilt static file instead of running heavy database queries — and is ready for several cities and languages. On 15 July the first real-world case worked: a useful answer in a city chat with a link to the map.
Search Console showed 85 of 260 pages indexed, two thirds of the crawl budget spent on scripts and styles, and the Mapbox content did not give crawlers ordinary links to places. I went after the causes: internal linking between articles and places, cleaning up service archives, a server-side catalogue of places with plain links. In the same weeks the first guide articles went live — Markets, Beaches, Shopping Malls — in Russian and English, written around real Google Trends demand. By 10 September the index held 199 pages, and August brought five times the visits of July.
The site lived in three inconsistent visual languages. I built one design system: two typefaces, the logo’s teal and the capybara’s orange, "live numbers" for rates and fares. Theme and widget code lives in GitHub and ships via auto-deploy, and a city switcher appeared in the header — ready for Phuket. Not everything went smoothly: one header version broke in another browser and I rolled it back overnight (see "What broke").
Launched a news section: short city updates with branded illustrations. Started exploring placement options for local businesses. High season is coming.
The city architecture for Phuket is already in place. Search Console points to German and French as the next languages. Placements for local businesses and drone footage — for everything text can’t explain.
Visits per month, Yandex Metrica. The August jump almost exactly matches the moment Google started indexing the pages.
Three moments that taught me the most.
Video, product, SEO and content — from the idea to the first thousands of visits.
Write to me ↗ Open Capymapa ↗