Hotel SEO is the work of getting a hotel, guest house, B&B or venue found on Google by people deciding where to stay, and then making sure that visit ends in a booking on your own website rather than through a booking platform that takes a commission. I help independent UK hotels and small groups with the search, listings and tracking side of that, so you can see which direct bookings search actually produced.
How guests search for somewhere to stay in the UK
A broad search such as “hotels in Bath” is crowded. The top of the page is usually Google’s own hotel results with live prices, then the map, then large booking sites. A 14-room hotel will rarely beat Booking.com or Expedia for that phrase in the ordinary results, but it can earn a place in the map and in Google’s hotel listings, which is where much of that traffic goes anyway.
The searches an independent hotel can genuinely win are the specific ones, where the guest tells Google why they are travelling: “dog friendly hotel with parking in Keswick”, “hotel near Twickenham Stadium”, “adults only spa break Norfolk”, “wedding venue with rooms in Shropshire”. Each of those describes a guest that one of your pages can answer better than a booking site’s filter can. Business travellers search the same way, by the office park, hospital or conference centre they need to reach.
Then there is your own name. Plenty of guests find you on a booking site and then search the hotel’s name to look at the website, the photos and the price before deciding where to book. If that search shows your site first, with clear rates and a reason to book direct, some of them will. If it shows a booking site above you, or a page that is slow and vague, you pay commission on a guest who had already chosen you.
Weddings, meetings, Christmas parties and group stays work differently again. These are longer decisions made by several people, and they end in an enquiry form or a phone call rather than the booking engine, so they need their own pages and their own measurement.
What is different about SEO for a hotel
The booking happens on someone else’s software
Most hotel sites hand the guest to a booking engine on a separate domain or inside an embedded frame. Unless cross-domain tracking is set up correctly, Google Analytics loses the original source at that hand-off, and bookings show up as coming from the booking engine itself. I fix this before anything else, because without it no one can say whether search is producing bookings or just visits.
Google’s hotel results are partly fed by your rates
The prices and free booking links shown in Google’s hotel results come from Google Hotel Center, usually connected through your channel manager or booking engine provider. Whether your direct rate appears there is a connection question, not a ranking one, and it is worth checking early. Your Google Business Profile also carries hotel-specific details such as amenities, check-in times and star rating, and wrong or missing details cost clicks. Setting that profile up properly is the core of my Google Business Profile optimisation work.
Reviews live on several platforms, and the law has tightened
Guests read reviews on Google, Tripadvisor and the booking sites, often all three. Since April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has made it unlawful in the UK to commission fake reviews or to present reviews in a misleading way, so practices such as review gating, where only happy guests are asked to post publicly, are a legal risk as well as a Google policy problem. Asking every guest after checkout is fine. The same Act requires unavoidable charges, such as a mandatory cleaning or resort fee, to be included in the price you show.
Rooms, offers and seasons change
Room types often differ only by view or bed size, which tempts hotels into near-identical room pages with nothing to rank for. Offers and packages come and go with the season, and pages for them are often deleted when they end, taking any links they earned with them. A hotel site needs a structure that copes with this: fewer, stronger room pages, and stable addresses for offers that return each year.
How I run hotel SEO work
- Check the booking path and tracking. I follow a guest from search to the booking confirmation and confirm that each booking reaches Google Analytics with its value and its original source.
- Tidy the listings. Your Google Business Profile, the Hotel Center connection, duplicate or outdated listings, and your name, address and phone number on tourism directories and booking sites.
- Map why guests come. With you, I list the real reasons people stay (walking, weddings, the nearby racecourse, a spa, travelling with a dog) and decide which deserves its own page. Search demand is checked before any page is planned.
- Write and rework the pages. Rooms, location and getting here, local guides you are genuinely placed to write, meetings and events, weddings and dining. Room descriptions copied from a booking site listing are rewritten, because the same text in many places is duplicate content and the booking site usually wins it.
- Fix the technical problems. Heavy photography slowing mobile pages, booking engine pages showing in Google, expired offers returning errors, and hotel structured data that tells Google your address, amenities and price range. The deeper fixes fall under technical SEO.
- Report on bookings. Each month I report direct bookings, revenue and enquiries from organic search and your Google profile, compared with the same month last year, because comparing August with July tells you about the season, not about SEO.
Mistakes I see on hotel websites
- A homepage that tries to do everything, with no page for the reasons guests actually come.
- Room text pasted from the hotel’s booking site listing, or the reverse.
- A “Book now” button that opens the booking engine with no tracking, so every booking looks like it came from the booking engine.
- Last season’s offers deleted rather than updated, leaving broken pages behind.
- Photographs uploaded at full camera size, making the gallery the slowest page on the site.
- An old Google listing left over from previous owners or a previous name, splitting reviews and confusing guests.
- No prices anywhere on the site, which sends price-checking guests straight back to the booking sites.
Where SEO fits with booking sites, ads and the rest
Booking sites are a distribution channel, and most hotels will keep using them. SEO is about winning the specific searches and the guests who already know your name, so that a larger share of bookings comes direct. How large a share depends on your location, your rates and how much of your demand is from repeat and local guests, and I will not promise a figure.
Paid search often sits alongside it. Booking sites bid on hotel names, and a small brand campaign can win back some of the guests searching for you by name before they book through a commission-taking site; I cover that in Google Ads for hotels. If your hotel has a restaurant that serves non-residents, it has its own searches and its own profile to look after, which I cover under restaurant SEO.
Next step
If you would like to know where your hotel stands, request a free SEO audit. Send me the website and the name of your booking engine, and I will check whether bookings are tracked to their source, how your Google listing looks, and which two or three pages I would build or fix first.