SEO for hotels, taking bookings back from the OTAs.
Booking.com and its competitors will out-rank you for almost every generic search, and they are frequently bidding on your own hotel name as well. That is the commercial reality and no amount of optimisation reverses it.
What is winnable is direct booking: the guest who already knows your name, or who is searching something specific enough that the OTAs have not built a page for it.
Your own name is the battleground
The highest-value search you have is your hotel name, made by somebody who has already decided. Every one of those bookings taken by an OTA costs you commission on a guest you had already won.
Ranking first for your own name, with a direct booking route that is obviously better — best rate, free cancellation, room choice — is the single highest-return piece of work available to a hotel.
Specific beats generic, always
You will not beat Booking.com for 'hotels in Galway'. You can beat them for 'dog friendly hotel Connemara', 'hotel with EV charger Killarney', 'family room Dingle three nights'.
Those searches are specific, high-intent and unprofitable for an OTA to target individually. They are the long tail that belongs to independent properties.
Facility and need pages
Dog friendly, accessible rooms, EV charging, family rooms, sea view. Specific and under-served.
Local guide content
What to do nearby, written properly. Ranks for planning searches months before a booking.
Event and occasion pages
Weddings, communions, golf, walking. High value and searched distinctly.
Direct booking incentive
Stated plainly on every page. The whole point of the exercise.
Accurate profile and photographs
Because a good share of guests decide from the Google listing without opening the site.
Reviews feed more than the map
Hotel reviews are aggregated and displayed across Google, the OTAs and travel sites, and they move both ranking and conversion at once.
Answering them — all of them, in a real voice — is visible work that affects revenue more directly here than in almost any other category.
What it costs
SEO is included in the €1,500 a month alongside the advertising, the social and the lead follow-up. There is no separate SEO fee, no setup fee and no contract beyond the month you are in.
Questions from hotels and guesthouses
For generic searches, no. For specific ones — dog friendly, EV charging, family rooms, accessible — yes, and those are unprofitable for an OTA to target individually.
Ranking first for your own hotel name with an obviously better direct booking route. Every one of those taken by an OTA is commission on a guest you had already won.
They move ranking and conversion simultaneously and are displayed across Google and the OTAs at once. Answer all of them.
No, and nobody honest does. We report enquiries and what they cost, with rankings as a diagnostic rather than the deliverable.
SEO is included in the €1,500 a month alongside everything else. There is no separate SEO fee and no setup fee.