Independent hotel
You own the domain and the booking path, so every gain compounds. The constraint is time, not permission.
03The arithmetic
What commission costs you, on your own numbers.
Set the figures to what you actually run. Nothing is sent anywhere and the arithmetic is shown in full underneath.
Step 1 / Property type
Step 3 / Result
You pay roughly
0
a year in OTA commission, in your currency.
Moving 15% of that volume to direct would keep
0
a year, in your currency.
45 rooms × 365 × 68% occupancy × 145 ADR = 1,619,505 room revenue
× 45% via OTA = 728,777 · × 18% commission = 131,180 paid in commission
15% of that volume moved to direct = 19,677 kept
Step 4 / The comparison
The Platinum program is $325 USD a month, or $3,900 USD a year. At these numbers that is 19.8% of what you would keep.
These are illustrative projections based on figures you entered. They are not a forecast or a guarantee. Commission rates and channel mix vary by property and contract.
Recommended from your numbers: Platinum
04The argument
Your channel mix is a cost decision.
Online travel agencies take a substantial share of every booking they deliver. Commission commonly runs in the mid-teens to mid-twenties as a percentage, depending on the platform, the contract, and whether the property takes part in preferred or accelerator programs. That is why the industry has spent a decade on book direct campaigns. A direct booking keeps the margin and it keeps the guest relationship with it.
01 Demand that already exists for your destination
02 Arrives through a listing, which keeps a share of it
03 Or arrives through your own site, and you keep all of it
04 Same guest, same room, different margin
We are not going to tell you that online travel agencies are the enemy or that you should leave them. They deliver real volume, they reach guests you will not reach on your own, and for most properties they will remain part of the mix.
The goal is not abolition. The goal is a better ratio. A mid-size property can be paying six figures a year in distribution cost, and moving even a modest share of that volume to direct dwarfs any search program fee by an order of magnitude.
- Most properties compete only on their own name, which they already win, and cede everything upstream to listings and metasearch.
- Guests search the destination, the neighborhood, the experience and the room type long before they search a property name.
- Property name searches are routinely intercepted, so a property frequently loses its own branded search to a listing that charges it commission.
- Booking windows and seasonality vary enormously by property type and market, so a resort program and an urban business hotel program should not look the same.
We will not advise you on rate parity, contracts or distribution agreements. Those are commercially and sometimes legally sensitive, and they are your commercial team's call, not an SEO agency's.
06Services
What we do.
- 01
Hotel SEO
The core program. Destination, neighborhood, room type and amenity terms, not only your property name.
- 02
Direct booking SEO
Built around the commission argument. Defend your own name in search and win the demand upstream of it.
- 03
Local and map visibility
Map surfaces and metasearch sit alongside classic organic results for a property. We work all three.
- 04
Content
Written and posted for you through LavishContent, our sister brand. Monthly plans from $26 USD.
- 05
Website design
SEO ready sites from $400 USD, one time. This is where a vanity property site sits for a flagged hotel.
- 06
Reputation management
Guest reviews feed visibility as well as conversion. Offered through the parent agency, priced on request.
07Segments
The properties we work with.
Six segments, six different search problems. Scroll across.
Boutique hotel
High rate, few rooms, and a design led story that ranks well when the content matches the search.
Resort
Long booking windows and destination led discovery. Guests search the place before the property.
Chain affiliated
No control over brand.com. We work the surfaces the brand does not own, within brand standards.
Bed and breakfast
The highest OTA dependency of any segment, and the smallest budget. Local visibility does most of the work.
Management group
A portfolio, several domains and one reporting standard. Titanium covers four domains at once.
09Reporting
How reporting works.
Every link is delivered with a live, clickable URL, and you own the assets forever. You can open the report and check the work yourself, which is the only reporting standard that means anything.
| Keyword | Placement URL | Type | Date live |
|---|---|---|---|
| boutique hotel, your destination | travelwriting.example/city-guide | Guest post | 2026-07-14 |
| where to stay, your neighborhood | regional-journal.example/stay | Guest post | 2026-07-18 |
| suites with a terrace, your city | web2-platform.example/property-notes | Web 2.0 | 2026-07-22 |
| spa hotel, your destination | lifestyle-title.example/spa-roundup | Guest post | 2026-07-29 |
The table above illustrates the report format only. The keywords are generic, the domains use a reserved documentation suffix and cannot resolve, and the rows are not real placements. Your own report carries live URLs you can open.
10Pricing
Build the program.
Month to month, cancel anytime, setup fee waived, dedicated account manager on every plan. All prices in US dollars.
1 / SEO program
2 / Content plan, optional
Written and posted for you through LavishContent, our sister brand. Prices are per month in US dollars, never per post.
| Posts per month | 500 words | 1,000 words | 2,500 words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 posts/mo | |||
| 8 posts/mo | |||
| 16 posts/mo | |||
| 30 posts/mo |
3 / Website, optional
4 / Reputation management
Guest review and reputation work Offered through the parent agency, priced on request. Guest reviews feed local visibility as well as conversion, across several
platforms at once, which makes this unusually relevant for a property. We do not publish a
price for it because we have not verified one. Read about it on the parent site.
11Proof
Published work, with links.
These are published results from our parent agency across other industries, with live links so you can read each one in full. They are not hotel campaigns and we do not present them as such.
50x Driving 50x traffic growth for a leading Singaporean online fruit delivery service Delivered outside the United States, in a competitive Asian market, entirely remotely. The same way we would work with a property in Lisbon, Queenstown or Cape Town. Read it on ultraseosolutions.com → 900% From 5 leads a week to 40+ a day: a 900% growth story A local service business competing on map and location terms, which is the same surface a single property competes on for its destination. Read it on ultraseosolutions.com → 600% From invisible to in-demand: a 600% spike in high-value roofing leads High-value, low-frequency purchases where a single additional inquiry is worth a great deal. A direct booking behaves the same way. Read it on ultraseosolutions.com → 500% From buried in search to page one: a 500% increase in high-value case inquiries One of the most competitive verticals in search. Hotel terms are contested by OTAs with far larger budgets, which is a similar problem. Read it on ultraseosolutions.com → 1200% From 10 demos a day to 120+: a 1200% surge in qualified leads Long consideration cycles and research-led discovery, which is how a resort guest behaves across a booking window of several months. Read it on ultraseosolutions.com →
What clients say
EFFECTIVE! We started seeing results after just a few weeks. Highly recommend this SEO agency for anyone serious about ranking higher.
What I appreciate most about these guys is their transparency. No vague promises, no secret sauce, just clear strategies that actually work. They send detailed reports every month, answer all my questions, and adjust the plan whenever needed. We have grown our search traffic steadily since signing up.
He was upfront about what SEO can and cannot do, and he never tried to upsell me into something I did not need. In fact, he actually recommended I go with a smaller package than the one I was planning to buy.
Press mentions
Nasdaq · Yahoo Finance · Business Insider · Associated Press · MarketWatch
Recognition
DesignRush top SEO company · Top 5 SEO agencies worldwide · SEMrush Agency Partner · Warrior Forum top SEO agency · HubSpot certified
12Guides
Read before you buy anything.
01 Reducing OTA commission The long version of the argument on this page, including what does not work and what we would not try. 02 Hotel SEO tools, assessed What the software actually does, which parts are worth paying for, and which free options are good enough. 03 What hotel SEO is A plain explanation for a general manager who has been sold something vague before. 04 What hotel SEO costs Real numbers, what changes them, and how to tell whether a quote is reasonable.
13Questions
Questions.
How is hotel SEO different from SEO for any other business?
Hotel SEO differs in one structural way: you are competing against your own distribution partners. Online travel agencies rank and bid for your property name, so a property often loses its own branded search to a listing that then charges it commission. On top of that, most demand starts with the destination, the neighborhood or the room type rather than your name, and that upstream demand is where the volume sits.
What does it cost, and are there contracts?
Programs run from $65 USD to $575 USD a month, month to month, with no contract and the setup fee waived. Every plan includes a dedicated account manager. For a single property we usually recommend Platinum at $325 USD a month, because a property targeting room types, amenities, location terms and a destination needs more than 20 keywords to work with.
We are chain affiliated and cannot change brand.com. Is there anything you can do?
Yes, and it is one of the most common situations we see. You cannot touch the corporate domain, the templates or usually the booking path, so we do not pretend otherwise. What remains available is local and map visibility for the property itself, guest review volume and recency across the platforms that feed it, third party surfaces the brand does not control, and where your brand standards permit it, a vanity property site on a domain you own.
Do you guarantee rankings or a lift in occupancy?
No, and you should be careful with anyone who does. We do not guarantee rankings, occupancy, booking volume or revenue, because none of those are within any agency’s control. What we do commit to is that every link is delivered with a live, clickable URL you can open and check yourself, and that you own the assets forever.
Do you work with properties outside the United States?
Yes. Most demand for this work sits outside the United States and we deliver remotely, which is how search work has always been done. Our published case study for a Singapore client is direct evidence of delivering outside the US. We do not claim offices or staff in any market, because we do not have them.
How quickly does any of this show up?
Expect the first movement in months rather than weeks, and expect it to be uneven. Turnaround on the deliverables themselves runs from 8 to 18 days depending on the plan. Ranking movement depends on your market, your starting authority and how contested your destination is, which is why we report on the work delivered as well as the outcome.
15Start
Start with the arithmetic.
Send us the property and we will come back with what we would target, what it costs and what we would not bother doing. We reply within 24 hours on business days.