HI·06.8 · How to · 8 min
Get found beyond Google
You don’t need to “do SEO” in any grand sense. You need a dozen good links from places your guests already look, and a website that answers the questions they actually type.
Assuming your Business Profile is claimed and your own site owns searches for your property’s name, this guide is about the next ring outwards: people who don’t know you exist yet, finding you without an OTA taking the introduction fee.
The local ecosystem: your unfair advantage
Somewhere near your property is a wedding venue, a festival, a walking trail, a wonderful pub with rooms always full, a village hall that hosts reunions. Most of them keep a “where to stay” page, and most of those pages are begging for decent suggestions. One short, friendly email gets you on them:
“Hello! We host guests ten minutes from you at [property], and a lot of them come for your [weddings/festival/walks]. If you keep a list of places to stay, we’d love to be considered for it. Happy to return the favour; we recommend somewhere for dinner to every guest we host.”
Send ten of those and you’ll get three or four links. Each one delivers exactly the right visitor (someone already committed to the area, dates in hand) directly to your booking page, commission-free, for years. I’d take one venue link over a month of social posting without hesitation.
Listings that don’t take 15%
- Your local tourist board or DMO. Usually cheap or free to be listed, usually well-ranked on Google for “places to stay in [area]”, and usually only asking that you exist and answer emails.
- Book-direct platforms. Houfy, StayDirectly and (declared interest: it’s ours) Findstaygo list properties without OTA-scale commission. Treat them as bonus channels rather than saviours; the Tools page has honest notes on each.
- Niche directories that fit you. Dog-friendly, accessible stays, cycling-friendly, hot tubs. Guests searching a niche convert well because you either fit or you don’t.
Simple SEO for one property
Forget the industry; for a single property it comes down to three things any host can do in an afternoon:
- Say what and where you are in plain words. Your homepage title should read like “Rose Cottage: dog-friendly cottage for 4 in Wharfedale”, not “Home”, and not a poem. Google can’t rank what you won’t say.
- Answer real questions on your area page. Where to park, which pub does food on Mondays, whether the beach takes dogs in summer, how far the station is. These are the searches made by people about to book somewhere; be the site that answers them.
- Name your photos. “rose-cottage-garden-hot-tub.jpg” beats “IMG_4382.jpg”. Two minutes of renaming helps image search and costs nothing.
What to politely ignore
Agencies promising “page one” for a monthly fee, keyword-stuffed articles written for robots, and anyone who wants to sell you fifty backlinks. For one property, ten genuine local links and a helpful website beat all of it, and Google has spent twenty years getting better at knowing the difference.
There’s one discovery channel I’ve deliberately left out of this guide because it deserves its own honest treatment: social media, in guide HI·06.9.