SEO for Small Hotels: Attract More Guests Online with These Tips

How to do SEO for hotels? As a small hotel, attracting direct bookings and competing with websites like Booking.com is a hard task. To be more precise, winning a guest’s trust is a hard task – or is it?

When I book a hotel on Booking.com, I have a ‘genius’ discount, a mobile app-only discount, I don’t question the site’s reliability for a second, and I can compare dozens of options different in cost and location within one smooth search. Perfect – for a guest! An independent small hotel site can hardly compete with the domain authority, bonus systems, and unbreakable trustworthiness of big brands and OTAs like Booking.com. Especially for newcomers, standing out can be a real challenge. But what does hotel SEO have to do with these challenges? Does it help tackle them?

My simple answer is that – well-done SEO helps you make your small hotel easier to discover by prospects. This is your first step to increase direct bookings:

• SEO directly affects your hotel’s website visibility in search engine results like Google.
• This visibility ensures your website appears alongside OTAs, especially for local or other relevant searches.
• SEO tips also include site speed performance and navigation, which helps you build a better flow in such a way that impresses users and entices them to better book directly.
• SEO enables hotels to rank for transactional queries like “cheap beach hotel with free breakfast in Miami” rather than just informational searches.

SEO for hospitality is such a broad topic that we may write a book about it in the future. There is content SEO and technical SEO. You know that you need backlinks and a lot of quality content on your site – all they benefit SEO.

In this article, however, you can find rather actionable tips (along with some speculations and personal stories) that will help with any SEO strategy for hotels.

General Tips

Before getting down to the list of SEO hotel industry tips, I think a few important points should be made.

1. On-site hotel SEO can be more effective if you know the tools available for your site builder or CMS. For example, WordPress comes with many SEO plugins and services. So, it can be smart to start with understanding how the platform your site is powered by works and whether you can get some SEO perks without leaving your site.

2. If you have a widget for direct bookings on your site, make sure to create a separate page for it, preferably with related keywords, like ‘book now’ or ‘book hotel now’. If the booking engine generates separate indexed pages (e.g., /book-now with unique URLs), Google can crawl and rank them. A well-integrated, fast, and mobile-friendly booking form can help you improve the engagement metrics (low bounce rate, high time on site), all boosting SEO of your hotel site at the end of the day.

Now, we’re ready to start.

Optimizing Your Hotel Site for Google Maps

Your hotel site on Google Maps, with a direct booking link – there is no better sign of trustworthiness for search engines. For customers, too, it’s a trust signal of your hotel (other include customer reviews, awards, and security badges), it helps you build trust with customers.

To get your hotel on Google Search and Maps, you must register for a Business Profile on Google.

Business Profile helps hotel owners manage their business information and interact with potential customers. Here is how Google recommends doing it:

Step 1: Sign up for Business Profile

Verify and claim your business

Step 2: Engage with customers

For example, report inappropriate reviews and remove outdated photos.

Step 3: Manage your hotel’s details

• Hotel amenities
• Hotel attributes
• Hotel highlights
• Class rating
• Business hours
• Prices and booking links
• Businesses inside your hotel
• Set “located in” relations to your hotel

Dig Into Google Search Console to Analyze Real Searches 

Google Search Console, which you can access via the Google account attached to your site’s Google Analytics, lets you dig deeper into low-performing keywords, then use them in your ads and blog content to improve overall rankings.

How to discover them?

1. Go to Google Search Console → Performance → Search Results.
2. Identify pages with high impressions but low clicks (CTR < 2%).
3. Optimize title tags and meta descriptions for these pages to increase CTR.
4. Improve on-page SEO by adding related keywords and better content structure.

Artificial Intelligence & SEO for Small Hotels

Well, I’ve seen many predictions about how AI will transform the search we know. AI is the first point of reference for product recommendations, itineraries, tours, and bookings; it should only grow in the future.

In the past, I was researching the best AI tools for hotels, which help you perform simple and complex tasks in advertising and marketing, for example, chatbots, AI-powered ads, and AI responses. I’m including a short list of the SEO for hospitality tools if you don’t want to read the entire article:

• Performance Max – AI-run Google ads.
• DialogShift: artificial intelligence hotel tool.
• Mara Solutions – AI response generator.
• Gamechanger by Duetto – hotel profit prediction.
• PolyAI – AI voice assistant.
• Verint – conversational AI, forecasting and scheduling.

For instance, a chatbot is better at instant assistance, which helps with bounce rates, because if a prospect has a question, they can get their answers faster. They won’t leave for OTAs. Think even further – AI chatbots can analyze FAQs and identify trending customer queries to help with new SEO content strategies.

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Create Unique Content about Local Experiences, Tours & Events

Content creation for marketing and SEO purposes, in 2025… Does it make sense? Yes, if it meets the expectations of travelers.

Events and experiences are a big window of opportunities to increase your occupancy rates, even without bookings coming through online travel agents (OTAs).

I remember the boom of ‘event-cation’ (event+vacation) after the COVID-19 times were over: people were no longer just taking vacations to relax on the beach, they wanted exciting experiences built around major events. And this trend continues to thrive. Travelers are planning trips around concerts, sports events, and unique activities. And it’s not necessarily about Taylor Swift’s gigs; those can be smaller things, for example, the day of The Open Pottery Day in Germany also drives significant domestic travel! Open your local sites and apps to discover future events and add them to your hotel website.

However, you should not limit your content creation resources to the traditional blog content. Experiment with short and longer videos to attract more prospects since video marketing is one of the hottest trends, especially in the hospitality sector.

Top Tips from Authoritative SEO Resources – All in One Place

The competition among SEO resources is as fierce as among hotels in hotspots… To assist you on this matter, we’ve curated a few top tips from top SEO blogs and platforms. Find them below.

1. Google Search Central

Tip: Optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP) with accurate hotel details, high-quality images, and updated amenities to improve local search rankings and always have up-to-date info for guests.
Resource: Google Business Profile for Hotels

2. Moz

Tip: Moz focuses on online directories such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, Booking.com, it’s going to improve local search visibility.
Resource: Moz Guide to Local SEO

Editor’s note for this tip: However, if you want to avoid listing your site on OTAs, you may simply submit your hotel to other resources. For example, many independent hotel websites in Basel, Switzerland, are listed on the official Basel tourism website, which adds SEO value to individual hotel site domains. As a guest, I also trust independent hotel sites if they are listed on such official city websites, which means it’s easier for me to book directly with a hotel.

3. Ahrefs

Tip: Focus on long-tail keywords like “best boutique hotel in [city]” or “family-friendly hotels near [landmark]” to attract high-intent travelers.
Resource: Ahrefs SEO for Hotels

4. Semrush

Tip: Backlinks from local businesses, directories, and events serve to enhance your local SEO by associating your site with a specific area.
Resource: Semrush Marketing for Hotels

Editor’s note for this tip: Specific events are often the primary reason people choose a hotel in your area, so be sure to include an events calendar on your hotel’s website. This will not only encourage potential guests to book with you but may also attract those who come across your site while searching for events.

5. Search Engine Journal (SEJ)

Tip: Use user-generated content (UGC), which is basically content created by travelers rather than your marketers, such as reviews, photos to improve the trustworthiness of your brand.
Resource: SEJ Guide Hospitality SEO

Use Traditional Ads to Enable Travelers to Discover Your Site

A few years ago, I saw a billboard featuring Neil Patel in a random airport. He is a well-known digital marketing guru, primarily focused on content marketing and organic traffic (free traffic from search engines like Google).

“Aren’t billboards too traditional as an advertising method – for a digital marketer?” I thought.

Recently, in one of his newsletters (yes, I am subscribed to them), he wrote, “Organic traffic is disappearing.”, inviting all subscribers to the webinar. That title is a challenging and controversial one but the problem was obviously whether AI like ChatGPT takes traffic away from Google.

Looking back, that billboard was quite forward-thinking. Even digital marketers who have all the skills, knowledge and power to generate organic traffic, are turning to traditional advertising in areas with high foot traffic. Even in the times when AI didn’t pose such threats to content creators!

The moral of the story…For hotels, this means that while paid ads may be necessary, alternative traffic sources also work, especially for domestic travels. How is this a SEO tip? You are sending ‘direct’ traffic to your site when people manually search your hotel brand on Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo/etc.

Don’t Neglect Technical Hotel SEO

Technical hotel SEO helps search engines better read and understand the structure of your site, its performance, and the usability level for the traveler. When done well, these are all positive signals to the search engine crawlers. Make sure you’ve done this:

1. Use image CDN and lazy loading features to faster load hotel site assets.
2. Keep an eye on the Core Web Vitals.
3. Implement a mobile-first design & UX.
4. Create a separate page for a booking widget.
5. Upgrade your hosting to HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 for faster loading times and improved security.
6. Minify and defer JavaScript/CSS files to improve page speed, especially for interactive booking elements.
7. If your hotel serves international guests, add the language switcher.
8. URLs should be clean and keyword-rich.
9. Use smart internal linking between rooms, amenities, and special offers to boost indexing and ranking (deep indexing).

Concluding on Top Search Engine Optimization Tools for Hotels

Let’s sum up some of the key takeaways for hotel SEO in the table below.

Once you’ve managed to make your site better discoverable in search engines by optimizing it for local keywords and submitting to various third-party platforms, your next task is to make sure it meets the expectations of your customers once they discover it. That includes flawless booking processes, multiple vacation tips and insights, travel guides, etc.