7 Common Hotel SEO Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

When we take on a new hotel client, our SEO team performs an audit. More often than not, we see the same opportunities, even for well‑known brands.

Below are eight frequent mistakes and some suggestions to help your team avoid them.

1. Skipping Google Shopping for Your Gift Vouchers

The biggest oversight we see is hotels not promoting their gift vouchers or experience packages through Google Shopping. Many properties sell vouchers through an affiliate, which usually takes a commission.

When you list your own vouchers in Google Shopping, you get access to another free organic channel plus the ability to run paid campaigns. Even a third‑party article about selling gift cards notes that Google Shopping boosts visibility and can be a powerful platform for paid and organic search.

We encourage clients to upload their voucher feed directly to Google Merchant Center. It gives you additional exposure in search results, improves conversion rates and reduces reliance on affiliates.

2. Not Connecting to a Metasearch Feed

Metasearch engines such as Google Hotel Ads or Trivago drive significant direct bookings for hotels. Google’s hotel advertising guidelines explain that hotels can verify a free Business Profile, update it with photos and amenities, and then connect their real‑time rates through a connectivity partner.

When you send rates and availability to Google, you get free booking links and can participate in paid hotel ads. According to a Mews study, metasearch can account for around 30% of a hotel’s direct bookings and hotel ad conversions can be 50% higher than conversions on typical hotel websites (Mews).

Even if you don’t plan to put money behind metasearch advertising, it is worth setting up the feed to benefit from the free, direct bookings you get by pushing your rates out.

3. Treating Seasonal Pages as One-Off Campaigns 

Another common mistake is to build a landing page for Christmas, summer or other seasonal campaigns, keep it live for a few months, then delete it once the season ends.

Search engines trust and rank pages based on age and authority. We always advise keeping pages live year‑round, reworking the content after the season is over, and then updating it for next year as-and-when you have the new information available.

This turns these pages into evergreen hubs that can collect email sign‑ups in the off‑season and capture guests who may be searching to book very early in the year. This way you preserve rankings and continue generating interest even when your main offer isn’t live.

4. Forgetting Business Profiles for Restaurants, Spas and Other On-Site Amenities 

It’s surprising how many hotels create a Google Business Profile for the property but neglect to create or claim separate listings for their other areas such as restaurants and bars, spas or self‑catering lodges.

Google’s own guidelines explain that publicly facing departments within businesses may have their own Business Profiles as long as they operate as distinct entities with separate entrances, signage, names and categories (Google).

A separate profile lets you showcase menus, opening hours and photos for the restaurant or spa and appear in local searches for those types of searches, increasing visibility for these areas.

5. Skipping Keyword Research and Targeted Metadata 

Keyword research is still the foundation of hotel SEO. Keyword research as the process of identifying the phrases your potential guests are using when searching for accommodation.

Using tools like Google’s free Keyword Planner or Semrush helps you find high‑intent booking terms and long‑tail searches. Once you know what people are searching for, you can create blog posts, package and offer pages that speak directly to those needs. Incorporating primary keywords into your page titles, meta descriptions, and other important tags across your page.

During audits we find that these meta tags are either left default, or increasingly have been created within an AI platform, which is quite easy to stop, and tends to only guess your keywords, without using actual keyword data.

Investing time in proper keyword research and training your team on metadata basics pays off in higher click‑through rates, better rankings and a much greater reach in search for your hotel.

6. Loading Everything as a Background Image

Hoteliers and guests alike love big, beautiful photos. But, sometimes, websites are built with images coded as CSS background images instead of the usual <img> tag.

Background images can’t have alt text, and aren’t seen in the same way by search engines and screen readers, who can ignore them.

If your key images throughout your website templates use <img> tags, it allows use of alt and title attributes which improve your SEO and accessibility and help them to show in image search, whereas background images are not read by search engines and may slow down the page slightly.

7. Not Taking Search into Account Within Your Social Strategy

Social media matters for SEO because it expands your brand’s visibility beyond Google. Google now shows “Short Videos” results pulled from platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, meaning your social content can appear directly in search. Major social platforms are crawled and can be indexed, so public posts often show up in Google results.

AI systems also pull from social content, posts, and public data to answer prompts, making social activity influential in AI-driven discovery.

And because users increasingly search inside social platforms themselves (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest), your brand’s presence and optimisation within each platform’s own search engine are now essential parts of modern SEO.

Improve Your Hotel’s Visibility and Boost Bookings

By addressing the issues above, you can improve your hotel’s visibility and bookings. These are the things we look for during every audit because they have a real impact on performance.

If you need help tackling them, we’re here to chat. If you’d like to discuss how Click2Convert can help with your digital marketing activity, discover our services and get in touch today!