Hotel SEO: how a hotel's website shows up on Google, from Google's own guidance

This is OneHorizyn's own guide, written from Google Search Central's documentation, and not a Google page. Start by checking that Google has your pages at all:

1. 1Search on Google for site: followed by your website's address, such as site:example.com, with your own address in place of example.com.
2. 2If your pages appear, they are in Google's index. If nothing appears, check that no page you want found is blocked by your robots.txt file, marked noindex, or behind a login.
3. 3Make sure every page you care about is linked from another page of your website: Google says it finds most new pages through links.
4. 4Add a sitemap, a file that lists your pages, if your website builder makes one. Google calls it optional, and many website builders create it for you.

Search Console is Google's own tool for seeing how your website does in Google Search. Adding your website changes nothing on Google; it only lets you see its data.

1. 1Open Search Console and its property selector.
2. 2Select “+ Add property”, then choose a website property.
3. 3Choose Domain, which covers every version of your address and is verified only with a DNS record in your domain's settings, or URL prefix, which covers addresses starting exactly as you type it and offers more ways to verify.
4. 4Follow the verification steps and click “Verify”, or click “Verify later” and finish from the property selector.

Data starts to appear within a few days. Then look at:

• The Performance report: the clicks and impressions your website gets from Google Search, by query, page, country and device, for the past three months by default. The Queries tab shows the words guests used to find you.
• Index coverage: which pages Google has indexed or tried to index, with any errors or warnings.
• URL Inspection: whether one page is indexed, how Google sees it, and a way to ask Google to crawl it again after a change.
• Core Web Vitals: how your pages perform for real visitors.
• Sitemaps: where you submit your sitemap and see its status.

The blue link in Google's results, which Google calls the title link, comes mostly from the page's title element, and Google says a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and describes what is on it. It can include your hotel's name and its town. Google's other advice for titles:

• No lists of keywords, and no word repeated over and over.
• No title used on several pages, or the same words on every page with one detail changed.
• Put your hotel's name in it briefly, set off from the rest of the title by a separator.
• Make it clear which line on the page is the main heading, and write it in the page's own language.

The short text under the link, the snippet, is mostly taken from the page itself, but Google sometimes uses the page's meta description. Google says a good one is short, unique to that page and gives its most relevant points, with a description for the whole website on the home page. There is no length limit, but Google cuts long ones short, and a string of keywords is unlikely to be shown.

Google says helpful content probably matters more than anything else in its guide. For a hotel, that means a page guests would want to read:

• Easy to read: short paragraphs under clear headings.
• Your own: written from what you know about your hotel and your town, not copied from another website.
• Up to date: old offers and closed facilities changed or taken down.
• Written in the words different guests use. Google's own example is that one person searches for charcuterie and another for a cheese board; a hotel may be searched for as a guest house, a homestay or a hotel near the station.
• Linked with words that say where each link leads, not “click here”.
• Addresses that say what the page is, such as /rooms/deluxe-double, rather than a string of numbers.
• No adverts or pop-ups that get in the way of reading the page.

Google adds that a page's length alone doesn't matter for ranking, and that the same content on two addresses isn't penalised, though you should point Google to the main one with a redirect or a canonical link. In practice, the facts guests ask about (check-in times, parking, breakfast, distances, policies) belong in words on your pages, not only in a photo or a brochure to download (see the guide on questions guests ask before booking).

• Put photos in standard HTML image elements: Google doesn't index pictures set as a background in the page's style.
• Give every photo alt text: a short description that explains what it shows and how it relates to the page. Google warns against filling it with keywords.
• Name the files plainly, such as deluxe-double-lake-view.jpg rather than IMG00023.JPG.
• Place each photo near the text about it, on the page about that subject.
• Use a format Google supports: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG or AVIF.
• Offer smaller versions for phones with srcset, and always keep a plain src for browsers and crawlers that don't read it.
• Keep files small: Google says images are often the largest part of a page and can make it slow.

Structured data is a short block of code that states facts about your hotel in a form Google reads directly. The vocabulary everyone uses, schema.org, has a Hotel type, a kind of LodgingBusiness, which is itself a kind of LocalBusiness, and Google asks you to use the most specific type that fits. Google's documentation for a local business asks for:

• Required: the name, and the full address.
• Recommended: the telephone number with its country and area codes, the latitude and longitude to at least 5 decimal places, the website address, which must work, and opening hours where they apply.

Schema.org's Hotel type adds facts a guest asks about: checkinTime and checkoutTime, numberOfRooms, petsAllowed, amenityFeature for each facility, availableLanguage for the languages your staff speak, and starRating for an official rating from a national body.

1. 1Write the block as JSON-LD, in a script tag of type application/ld+json, on the page about your hotel.
2. 2Test it with Google's Rich Results Test and fix any critical errors.
3. 3Publish the page, then check it in Search Console's URL Inspection tool.

Don't mark up your own guests' reviews to win stars in Google's results: Google says reviews a business controls about itself are not eligible for the star display. Markup that breaks Google's guidelines can bring a manual action against the website.

Google reads the phone version of your website to index and rank it. Its advice:

• The same content, headings, structured data, titles, descriptions and alt text on the phone version as on the computer version.
• Nothing important that appears only after a tap or a swipe.
• One design that adjusts to the screen, which Google recommends as the easiest to build and keep up.

Google measures how a page feels to real visitors with three Core Web Vitals: how soon the main content shows, how quickly the page answers a tap, and whether it jumps about as it loads. Google says good scores align with what its ranking systems seek to reward. See yours in Search Console's Core Web Vitals report, or test one page with Google's PageSpeed Insights.

When guests search for hotels in a town, Google's local results come mainly from three things: relevance, how well a profile matches the search; distance from the guest who is searching; and prominence, how well known the hotel is, including how many websites link to it and its reviews and ratings. Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Its own tips:

• Verify your Business Profile.
• Keep it complete and accurate: address, regular and special hours, category, and attributes such as parking or Wi-Fi.
• Reply to reviews, and gather more of them.
• Add photos and videos.

1. 1Signed in to the Google Account that manages your profile, go to your Business Profile on Google Search, or tap “Business” at the bottom right of the Google Maps app.
2. 2Select “Edit profile”.
3. 3Fill in or correct each section, including your website's address, so your profile links to your own site.
4. 4Select “Save”. Google checks changes before they show.

For more, see the guides on your Google Business Profile, on Google Maps ranking, and on Google's free booking links.

• Keyword stuffing, including blocks of text that list the towns and areas a page is trying to rank for.
• Doorway pages: many pages or domains aimed at different towns or regions that all lead guests to one page.
• Pages turned out in bulk mainly to rank, text hidden from visitors, and links bought or sold for ranking.
• Relying on the meta keywords tag, which Google doesn't use, or on keywords in your domain name, which Google says have hardly any effect.

Google's advice on hiring help is plain: no one can promise a top ranking on Google, so if someone does, find someone else. Be wary of agencies that email you out of the blue, of anyone who won't explain what they will do, and of anyone who asks you to link to them. Ask what results they expect, by when, and how they will measure them.