Service
SEO for hotels, done as direct-booking work, month by month
SEO for hotels is a monthly service from £399 a month with a 3-month minimum, one property per town on the Local tier. Its job is measured in room nights: how many moved from OTA commission to direct, and how many were added from searches the OTAs cannot answer. The generic “hotel in your town” search belongs to Booking.com and we do not chase it. Your name, the hotel module, the specific searches and the AI answers are winnable, and that is where the work goes.
It fits
Properties that sell room nights and pay commission on too many of them
- An independent hotel, B&B, inn or holiday let with a Google listing, a booking engine or the willingness to get one, and a property system that can report last year's OTA share.
- An owner who wants the shoulder months filled and knows the August problem is not a marketing problem.
- A small group of two or three properties that each need their own listing, pages and report, on the Growth or Multi-property tier.
It does not fit
Where we will say so in the audit
- A holiday let under an agency exclusivity clause. If the agency takes every booking, the work sends guests to the agency. The clause has to go first.
- A property full year-round from direct and repeat guests. Keep the listing right and spend the money on the rooms.
- Anyone who wants “hotels in Bath”. We are not going to take that from Booking.com, and we will not invoice you for trying.
What a month contains
Seven channels, one routine
Every tier carries all seven. The tiers differ in how many properties, how much new content, and whether the direct-only offers and the mentions programme are built for you. A person does the work and the same person writes the report.
| Channel | What we do | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Your name | The listing kept complete; the price list on your name checked with real dates from a phone; any OTA bidding on your name reported | Weekly |
| The hotel module | The rate feed watched in Hotel Center so free booking links keep showing your rate; amenities and photos matched to the filters guests use | Monthly |
| The specific searches | One new page most months for a search the OTAs cannot answer: a room type, a season, the dog, the parking, the venue up the road | Monthly |
| Reviews | The check-out ask, the evening message, replies on Google and Tripadvisor within two days | Weekly |
| The booking path | Rates on the room pages checked against the engine, the total shown first, the funnel report read for where guests drop out | Monthly |
| Mentions | The tourism board, the town's visitor site, the route pages and the venue's recommended-stays list, with one consistent name, address and phone | Monthly |
| Measurement | Search Console, the booking engine's source report and OTA share of room nights, read by the person doing the work and written up in two pages | Monthly |
The three fights we take on
Your name, the module, the specific search
Your name is decided in the knowledge panel. A complete listing with your own rate in the price list puts you level with the OTAs at the moment of choice, at no commission, on the search most of your bookings begin with. We win this in the first month, and it is usually worth more than everything else in the first year.
The hotel module for a town search is built from listings, not websites, so a fourteen-room inn with a complete listing, steady reviews and a live rate sits beside properties ten times its size.
The specific searchis where SEO in the ordinary sense pays. “Dog friendly hotel near Bala Lake”, “family room for five Llandudno”, “quiet hotel with a bath November”: no OTA has a page for these, so a page of yours, written properly with a rate on it, ranks within months and stays. They fill the Tuesdays.
The one we refuse
“Hotels in [your town]”
Booking.com's page for your town has twenty years of links and hundreds of thousands of reviews behind it. An independent property is not going to outrank it for the head term, and a plan that says otherwise is a plan to invoice you for a year. The module inside that same results page is winnable, which is the point.
We also refuse town pages on a template, bought links, bought or gated reviews, and rewriting a page that already books.
The maths of commissionThe timeline, honestly
What moves when
- Weeks 1 to 3
- Audit, listing rebuilt, your rate into the price list, the review routine started. Name searches start booking direct.
- Months 1 to 3
- Booking path fixed; the first specific-search pages indexed; impressions rise for the searches we chose.
- Months 4 to 6
- Pages settle. The first Tuesdays you can trace to a page. The source report shows the OTA share moving, or we say so.
- Months 6 to 12
- The seasonal pages come round already indexed. Mentions and reviews compound. The report shows nights moved against cost.
A seasonal page only works if it is live before the booking window, which is why the Christmas page is written in July and the summer page in November.
Related
The channels this service runs across
Questions hotel owners ask us
Do you work with more than one property in a town?
One property per town on the Local tier, confirmed personally in the reply to the quote form, because two clients chasing the same name-and-town searches is a conflict we would have to hide from one of them.
Can you guarantee the top of the hotel module?
No, and neither can anyone else. We can guarantee the work, show you every number, and tell you by month six whether it is moving room nights.
Do I need to write anything?
No. We interview you for twenty minutes about the rooms, the seasons and the guests you want more of, then write. You check it for accuracy. Photos of the actual rooms and the breakfast are the one thing only you can provide.
What happens if I stop?
You keep everything: the listing, the rate feed, the pages, the reviews, the email list. The monthly work stops, so the seasonal pages stop being refreshed and the properties that keep going catch up over a year or so.
Find out how much of your booking revenue is leaving as commission
Send us your property name, your town and your website. You get a plain-English audit of your Google hotel listing, your booking path and the three properties above you, with a quote. No pressure, no long contract.