Sokada

SEO for Hotels.

Booking.com didn’t find that guest. Your reputation did, and you paid commission on it anyway.

The platforms outrank you for your own hotel’s name, then charge you for the reservation. SEO is how you take those bookings back onto your own site at full rate.

A guest searches your hotel by name and Booking.com takes the booking.

Someone’s seen your rooms on Instagram, or a friend has recommended you. They type your hotel’s name into Google on a phone. Above your own site sits Google’s hotel panel, then a paid ad or two from the platforms, then Booking.com’s listing for your property. They tap that, because it looks official and has a Reserve button. You still get the guest. You just pay a commission on a booking that was already yours.

That’s the part that stings. You earned the guest and you’re renting the checkout, paying a cut on a decision the platform had no hand in.

Put a number on the leak before you spend anything.

Take your last twelve months. How many room nights came through Booking.com, Expedia or your channel manager, what was the average rate, and what percentage went out in commission? Then ask how many of those guests already knew your name before they booked. Now work out what shifting even a modest share of them onto your own site at full rate would be worth over a year. That’s the figure to plan against, not traffic. Direct guests are worth more afterwards too, since you keep the email address.

Winning your own name is the cheapest ground you’ll ever take.

Brand search is the bit almost everyone leaves lying there. Your homepage needs your hotel’s name, its town and what the place actually is. Your Google Business Profile needs the same name, address and phone number as the site, with real opening hours and photographs that aren’t three years old. Reviews carry more weight here than anywhere, and they matter to the guest reading them, not just to Google. Answer the awkward ones properly.

Then there’s the search that pays the mortgage: hotel in [your town], dog-friendly rooms near [that coast path], somewhere to stay for a wedding at [the venue down the road]. Each of those wants a page of its own. One page listing every room type and facility won’t rank for any of them. A page about dog-friendly stays that says where you walk them, which pubs let them in and what you charge for it will.

Google’s travel results sit above you, so aim at the searches they don’t answer.

Search for seo for hotels and you’ll get ten checklists that all say optimise your meta descriptions. Fine, do that. But on a phone, for a bare “hotel in X” search, Google’s own hotel panel and the paid slots have pushed organic results a long way down. What you can still own outright are the reasons people come to your area at all. Where to walk the cliff path, what’s actually open in October, which beach has the car park. Write those properly and you meet the guest weeks before they’ve chosen a hotel, and yours is the site they’re already reading when they book.

The AI answer box is real, and it isn’t bought with a plugin.

Ofcom’s 2026 research found that 75% of online UK adults read AI search summaries at least sometimes, and 42% read them often or always. That is a large share of your prospective guests getting an answer before they see a single link. What earns a place in those answers is content that genuinely answers the question. There is no file to upload and no markup to add.

Who you’d actually be dealing with.

Us. We’re a family business in Heathfield and Julian has been building websites since 1997, which means the person who looks at your booking flow is the person who’ll still be answering the phone in two years. Blackstock Country Estate is a published case study, a country estate and wedding venue rather than a hotel, where enquiries rose 188% year to date and total website users 108%. Hospitality-adjacent, and honest about the difference.

Two jobs before anyone writes a page.

First, find out what your own brand search actually returns, because if an agency outranks you for your own name then every direct booking is being taxed on the way in. Second, count what the platforms took last year. That figure is usually the entire business case, and most hoteliers have never added it up.

After that it’s the rooms, the reason people come to the area, and a booking path short enough that nobody gives up and reopens Booking.com.

Not getting enough enquiries?

Book a free audit and we’ll spend 30 minutes going through your website, telling you exactly what’s holding it back and what we’d do to fix it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do you do SEO for hotels?

Start with your own name. Make sure your site, not an OTA listing, is what a guest lands on when they search your hotel by name, and get the Google Business Profile matching it exactly with real hours, rooms and current photographs. Then build a page for each genuine search: dog-friendly rooms, family rooms, somewhere to stay near a particular venue or beach. Then write about the area itself, because that’s where you catch people before they’ve picked a hotel.

What are the best SEO keywords for hotels?

The ones with a booking behind them. Your hotel’s name plus the town, “hotel in [town]”, “dog-friendly hotel [town]”, “hotel near [the venue or landmark that brings people here]”, and the rooms you actually want to fill midweek. Broad terms like “luxury hotel UK” look flattering in a report and won’t fill a room. We’d rather have twenty specific pages that each bring a handful of the right enquiries.

Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?

It’s moved, not died. On travel searches Google’s hotel panel and the ads take the top of a phone screen, so the win has shifted towards your brand search, your Google Business Profile, and content about the area. AI summaries are read by most UK adults now, and Google’s position is that a page only has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet to be quoted. Useful, specific pages still do the work. Volume for its own sake doesn’t.

Can ChatGPT do SEO for my hotel?

It’ll draft you a page in seconds, and that’s the problem. Batches of thin, templated pages published at scale are a documented enforcement pattern, and a site-level reassessment after a core update takes months to recover from. What a model can’t do is know what your rooms actually smell like on a wet October morning, or which pub takes dogs. Use it to speed up the writing, not to decide what’s worth writing.

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