The Nepali shop SEO checklist
Everything worth doing to get a shop in Nepal found, in the order it is worth doing it. Written for somebody who runs a shop, not for somebody who does marketing — and most of it has nothing to do with BaseBlock, because most of what actually works has nothing to do with any website software.
No form, no PDF, no “enter your email to continue”. If it is worth an email address it is worth reading first.
1. Google Business Profile — do this first, and it is free
For a shop with a physical address in Nepal, this is worth more than a website, an ad budget and every other line on this page put together. Somebody searching “momo Baluwatar” from a phone gets a map with three shops on it, and you are either one of them or you are not.
Claim the profile
Search your shop's name on Google Maps. If a listing already exists, claim it — Google creates them from data it has scraped and somebody else's wrong phone number may be on yours right now. If it does not, create one at business.google.com. Verification is usually a postcard or a phone call and takes a few days.Put the pin on the actual door
Not the building, not the chowk — the door. Google's automatic placement in Kathmandu is frequently a street away, and a customer standing in the wrong gali is a customer who orders from somebody else next time. Drag it yourself.Opening hours, kept true through the festivals
Hours are the most-read thing on the profile and the most-wrong. Set the special hours for Dashain and Tihar before they arrive; a customer who walks to a closed shutter because Google said you were open leaves a one-star review about it.Photographs — real ones, and a lot of them
The shopfront so somebody recognises it from the street. The inside. The products, in daylight near a window rather than under a tube light. Your staff. Profiles with real photographs get dramatically more clicks than profiles with a logo, and this costs nothing but an afternoon.Ask for reviews, out loud, in person
Nobody leaves a review unprompted. Ask a happy customer at the counter, while they are happy, and show them where. Reply to every review including the bad ones — a considered reply to a complaint sells better to the next reader than the complaint costs.
2. The words your customers actually type
This is where most Nepali shop websites lose, and they lose it before a single technical thing goes wrong. The page is written in the words the shop uses; the search is typed in the words the customer uses; the two are not the same words.
Write down what a customer would type, not what you would
You sell “ladies' ethnic wear”. They search “kurta Kathmandu price”. You sell “home décor solutions”. They search “curtain shop near me”. Open your own DMs and read how customers ask — those are the words, already written down for you by the people you are trying to reach.Romanised Nepali is a real search language
People search “sasto laptop Kathmandu” and “kurta ko price” in Roman letters, and they spell them differently every time — kati, kaati, katti. Put the common romanised spellings into your page text where they read naturally. Do not stuff them; a paragraph of misspellings helps nothing and reads as spam to a person, which is who has to buy from you.BaseBlock's inbox and automations already read those spellings as the same word.
Name the place, on the page
“Kurta shop in Baluwatar, Kathmandu” wins searches that “kurta shop” never will, and the people making them are twenty minutes away. Put the locality in your page title, your first paragraph and your contact section.One page per thing you sell
A single page listing forty products ranks for nothing in particular. A page per product, or at least per category, gives Google something specific to show for a specific search.Every product in your table gets its own page and link automatically.
3. The technical part — the part software can actually do
This is the smallest section on this page, deliberately. It is the part that gets sold hardest and matters least once it is done — but it does have to be done, and it is done once.
A title and description on every page
The title is the blue line in the search result and the description is the grey text under it. Write them for a person deciding whether to click, not for a search engine: about 60 characters for the title, about 150 for the description, and say the thing rather than listing keywords.Website → Settings → SEO extras.
A sitemap and a robots file
Both should exist and both should be correct. Neither is something you should ever have to think about.Generated for your site automatically, and kept in step as you add pages.
Turn search engines back ON when you launch
Almost every site is built with indexing switched off so a half-finished page does not get found, and a startling number are still switched off a year later. Check this the day you launch, and check it again a week later.Website → Settings → Search engines.
Your own domain
yourshop.com.np or yourshop.com, not a subdomain of somebody else's. It costs a few hundred rupees a year and it is the difference between building something and renting it.Connect it under Website → Settings → Domain.
Business details a search engine can read
Name, address, phone, hours and prices, marked up as structured data so Google can show them in the result rather than guessing at them.Generated from your business identity — nothing to write.
Speed, on a Nepali phone on a Nepali connection
Test on 4G on an ordinary Android phone, not on the office wifi on your laptop. The usual culprit is photographs: a 4MB product photo straight off a camera is the single most common reason a shop's site is slow.
4. The things that beat all of the above
Honest ranking of effort against return, for a Nepali shop specifically. If you only do two things on this page, do the Google profile and this section.
Instagram and Facebook are your search engine
For a great many Nepali shops, more customers arrive from a reel than from Google, and they arrive faster. Post consistently, reply to every comment, and make sure the link in your bio goes to a page that can take an order rather than to a phone number.Answer fast
A DM answered in five minutes converts many times better than the same DM answered tomorrow. No amount of SEO recovers a customer who asked the price at 9pm and heard back on Thursday.That is most of what the shared inbox and comment-to-DM automation are for.
Be linked to from somewhere real
A local directory, a supplier's stockist page, a blog that reviewed you, the Facebook group for your neighbourhood. A handful of genuine links from Nepali sites is worth more than any number of the paid ones somebody will offer to sell you — and the paid ones can actively harm you.Give it months, not weeks
A new domain ranks for very little for the first few months no matter what anybody does to it. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either buying links that will hurt you or picking a search nobody makes.
What we can and cannot promise
BaseBlock gives you the technical foundation: fast pages, a real page per product, titles and descriptions you control, a generated sitemap and robots file, structured business data, and your own domain. That is the part software can do, and it is done properly.
Where you rank is not up to us. It depends on what you write, how long your domain has existed, who links to you, how many shops are competing for the same search, and decisions Google makes and does not explain. Nobody who tells you otherwise is telling you the truth, and any company guaranteeing a position is either buying links that will eventually hurt you or has picked a search nobody makes.
What we will say plainly: the technical foundation is necessary and not sufficient, and it is not where most Nepali shops are losing. The Google Business Profile in section one and the answer-fast point in section four are worth more than everything else on this page, and neither costs anything.
Copy this, print it, hand it to somebody else. No attribution needed. If something here is wrong or has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected.