Frequently asked questions about hotel SEO

Hotel SEO is the practice of optimising a hotel website so it appears prominently in search engine results and AI recommendations when potential guests search for accommodation. It includes technical optimisation, content creation, local search visibility, schema markup and link building, all tailored to the hospitality industry.

GEO is the practice of making your hotel visible in AI-powered search systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. When a guest asks AI where to stay, GEO determines whether your hotel appears in the answer. It involves structured data, entity authority, content citability and platform-specific optimisation.

Hotels face unique challenges: seasonal demand patterns, OTA competition for brand terms, booking engine technical issues, multilingual guests, Google Hotels integration, rate parity considerations and a highly visual product. Generic SEO agencies apply a one-size-fits-all playbook. We build strategies around how hotel guests actually search and book.

OTAs charge 15-25% commission on every booking. SEO builds a direct channel you own. A hotel paying $9,000/month in OTA commissions could invest a fraction of that in SEO and gradually shift bookings to direct. Unlike OTA placement, organic visibility compounds over time and reduces your cost per acquisition.

SEO compounds over time. Most hotels see measurable improvements in organic traffic within 3-4 months. Meaningful impact on direct bookings typically takes 6-9 months. This is why our minimum engagement is 6 months — anything shorter rarely delivers ROI. AI visibility improvements can appear faster, within 4-8 weeks, because AI systems update more frequently than Google organic rankings.

No reputable SEO agency guarantees rankings. Google and AI systems control their algorithms and update them constantly. What we guarantee is a structured, data-driven process, transparent reporting, and a commitment to measurable improvement. We track metrics tied to bookings, not vanity metrics.

We track organic sessions to booking pages, direct booking conversion rate, revenue from organic search, click-through rate from search results, AI mention frequency and sentiment, and your direct booking share versus OTA share. Every monthly report ties activity to business outcomes.

Our engagements start from $3,000/month for a single-property Core programme. Most hotels invest $5,000-$9,000/month for the Growth tier that includes AI visibility and multilingual reach. Hotel groups are scoped at the Flagship tier starting from $9,000/month. We scope after a free discovery call, never before.

No. The first month includes audit, strategy and initial implementation. It is more labour-intensive, but we absorb that into the monthly retainer rather than adding a one-time charge.

Six months for Core and Growth tiers, twelve months for Flagship. SEO compounds over time and a shorter engagement rarely delivers meaningful results. After the minimum term, you can cancel with 30 days notice.

Yes. Start with a free AI Visibility Check for a focused snapshot, or commission a full strategic audit (typically $2,500-$5,000) before committing to a retainer. The audit fee is credited against the first month if you proceed.

GEO builds on SEO but is not the same thing. Good SEO gives you the foundation. GEO adds the entity authority, content citability and structured data optimisation that AI systems specifically need to recommend your hotel. In our Growth tier, both are integrated. Core-tier clients can add GEO as a module.

We optimise for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT (with browsing), Perplexity, Bing Copilot and any AI search system that retrieves and synthesises web content. Each platform weights signals differently, and we adapt our approach accordingly.

Our proprietary tracking tool that measures how hotels surface in AI recommendations across platforms. We query AI systems with real guest questions about your destination and track whether your hotel appears, how it is described, and how that changes over time.