Hotel SEO Checklist

Paste your website, read the report

Type your website above and press Check. It reads your home page — and up to five of your room or property pages — the way a search engine, an OTA-comparing guest and an AI assistant each would, and comes back in a few seconds with a score, a grade, and a plain-English reason for every finding. Nothing to tick yourself, nothing to install.

The report opens with the domain itself — the registrar, when it was registered and when it expires, the SSL certificate, the nameservers and where it is actually hosted — before moving into what a search engine, a guest and an AI assistant each see.

It is built specifically for hospitality, not a generic SEO tool with "hotel" in the title. It looks for a real booking engine rather than only a "book now" link, measures how fast the page answers for a guest on Cambodian mobile data, counts how many amenities a guest can actually read on the page, checks for a blog or news section, and finds your individual room pages to check whether they share one broken template.

Domain, hosting and security, first

Before anything about search or content: who the domain is registered through, when it was registered, when it expires, and whether it is locked against being transferred away. The SSL certificate — valid or not, how many days it has left. Whether Cloudflare or a similar CDN sits in front of the site. The nameservers, and where the address block is actually registered, since a site that claims to be fast can still be answering from the wrong side of the world.

Most registrars redact the registrant’s name and address from WHOIS now, and the report says so plainly rather than treating a blank field as something hidden.

Four doors, not one — SEO, OTAs, AEO and GEO

SEO is the one everyone knows: titles, headings, structured data, canonical tags, a blog or news section, Google Analytics and Search Console. This checks all of it, specifically for a property rather than a blog.

OTAs are checked as distribution, not a single link — how many of Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, Trip.com/Ctrip, Traveloka and Klook corroborate that the property exists, whether a real booking engine is integrated rather than only a contact form, and whether the site gives a guest a reason to book direct instead.

AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — is whether the site can be the direct answer rather than one of ten blue links: FAQ structured data, headings phrased as the questions guests actually ask, a rating published as data rather than only a widget.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is whether an AI assistant can even read the site to begin with: robots.txt checked against the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI features, and whether an llms.txt file exists to point an assistant at what matters.

Why a hotel website gets checked differently

A boutique hotel or resort is judged several times before a guest ever books: by a search engine deciding whether to show the site at all, by an assistant deciding whether to name it, and by a guest deciding whether to book direct or hand fifteen to twenty-five percent of the room rate to an OTA instead. Most SEO checkers are written for a blog or a shop and miss all but the first judgment.

This one checks the rest too. Every finding affects one of those decisions — whether the site gets found, whether an assistant can quote it, or whether a guest who already found it books on it rather than closing the tab.

What it actually reads

Your title, meta description and heading — whether they name the property and the destination, or just say "Home". Your structured data — whether it says Hotel or LodgingBusiness, and whether a rating and review count are published as data. Whether Google Maps is genuinely embedded rather than only linked, and whether a Google reviews widget is shown on the page itself. Whether a booking button opens a recognised booking engine — Cloudbeds, SiteMinder, Mews, Exely and over a dozen others — rather than only a WhatsApp link or a contact form. Your room and property pages, sampled to check each has its own title rather than sharing one template. How fast the home page answers, measured from Singapore, the closest major hosting hub to Cambodia. HTTPS, redirects, your sitemap and robots.txt — including whether robots.txt blocks the crawlers behind the AI assistants — and whether your address, phone and opening hours are published as data rather than only as text in the footer.

It reuses the same checks behind this site’s WHOIS, SSL, sitemap, speed and local-business tools rather than reinventing them — a redirect chain, a sitemap index, a TLS handshake or a Singapore-measured response time is not something worth getting subtly wrong a second time.

What it cannot see

It cannot see whether your own rate matches what the OTAs are charging for the same room, whether your Google Business Profile is claimed and current, whether the backlinks pointing at your site are worth anything, or whether ChatGPT currently recommends your property — that answer changes by phrasing and by day, and nobody can check it reliably. None of that is readable from outside your site, and the report says so rather than guessing.

Room and property pages are found by URL pattern — paths containing "room", "villa", "suite" or "property". A site that names its pages some other way will not be found by this and is worth checking by eye. The booking engine and OTA checks work the same way: recognised providers only, named honestly as a limit rather than guessed at.