Luxury hotel SEO: what travellers actually type into Google

SEO for a luxury hotel is the work that gets the pages of its website into Google’s results when a traveller searches for something the hotel can offer. The letters stand for search engine optimisation. The first step is knowing which words people really type, and how often.

To find out, we read Google Ads search volumes, the figures Google gives advertisers for how often a word is searched in a country. On 8 October 2026 we read about 450 of them across the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy and Switzerland. On 19 September 2026 we had read 1,470 searches made of an Italian five-star hotel’s name followed by one word, and 168 searches of the kind “hotel con piscina Roma” (hotel with a pool in Rome).

These are estimates. Google Ads Help says the average covers a keyword and its close variants, and that the figures are rounded. Every number on this page carries its country, its language and its period.

Hardly anyone searches for “the best hotels in the Alps”: the wider the place, the fewer the searches. You can see it by keeping the words fixed and changing only the place. In the United States “best hotels in the Alps” averages 50 searches a month. The same phrase with Lake Como gets 2,900, and with Rome 8,100.

The word “luxury” climbs the same ladder: “luxury hotels in the Alps” 90 searches a month, “luxury hotels in Switzerland” 1,600, “st moritz luxury hotels” 8,100. One resort town is searched five times as often as its country, and ninety times as often as its mountain range.

Britain behaves the same way. “Best hotels in the Alps” gets 70 searches a month in the United Kingdom, “where to stay in lake como” 1,000 and “lake como hotels” 6,600. In Italian, “hotel di lusso in Italia” (luxury hotels in Italy) gets 140, and for the Alps Google Ads returns no figure at all.

Words with no place in them have large numbers: “luxury hotels” 201,000 searches a month in the United States, “hotel 5 stelle” 9,900 in Italy. The person typing them has not yet said where they want to go, and a single hotel’s page has no way of answering.

In English the word is “luxury”, yet the largest search is the one with no adjective. In the United States “lake como hotels” gets 18,100 searches a month, “lake como luxury hotels” 3,600, “best hotels in lake como” 2,900 and “where to stay in lake como” 1,600.

That largest search, the place plus the word “hotels”, is the one a website’s pages can do least about. On 16 August 2026 we read 37 searches of that kind in Switzerland: on 34 of them Google’s page opened with a block of hotel cards, each showing a price. How those cards work is explained in our article on why your hotel does not show for “hotel + city” on Google.

In Italian, luxury is searched as “5 stelle”, five stars. In all five destinations we compared, “hotel 5 stelle” followed by the place beats “hotel di lusso” followed by the same place. Without a place the ratio is ten to one: 9,900 searches a month against 1,000.

These are searches a month in Italy, in Italian: the average of September 2025 to August 2026, read on 8 October 2026. A hotel that translates “luxury hotel” word for word into Italian picks the weaker phrase in every case we read.

The “hotel + need + destination” searches that actually exist are mostly the ones about a spa, a pool, parking and the railway station. On 19 September 2026 we took 12 Italian destinations, from Milan to Taormina, and 14 things a traveller may need: a spa, a pool, parking, the station, the airport, golf, a romantic trip, a family, a dog, a wedding, New Year’s Eve, cycling, the beach, skiing. That makes 168 searches of the kind “hotel con piscina Roma”. Google Ads returned a volume for 85 of them.

The pool search has a volume in all 12 destinations and the spa search in 11. The beach and ski searches have none, at least in the wording we tried. One of the 85 misleads: “hotel golf Firenze”, 1,900 searches a month, is the name of a hotel. Before you build a page on a search, open it on Google and look at who is there.

The need counts for more than the stars. “Hotel spa Dolomiti” gets 5,400 searches a month and “hotel 5 stelle Dolomiti” 210, about twenty-six times fewer. “Hotel con spa Toscana” gets 4,400 and “hotel 5 stelle Toscana” 390 (read on 8 October 2026). In the Dolomites and in Tuscany, people search for the spa more than for the stars.

After a hotel’s name people mostly type the word for prices, then the spa and the restaurant. To measure it we chose 42 Italian five-star properties from the Google Hotels listings of 12 destinations: 11 in Milan, 9 in Rome, 5 in Florence, the rest across Venice, Lake Como, Sorrento, Positano, Taormina, Puglia and the Dolomites. We put 35 words after each name, which makes 1,470 searches. Then we counted, word by word, how many of the hotels have a measurable volume in Italy.

Across the 40 hotels the price searches add up to 6,610 a month. The restaurant searches add up to 3,490 and the room searches to 170. Eight words returned no volume for any hotel, among them the words for family, children, weekend and booking.

One example, from public Google Ads data read on 8 October 2026. In Italy “four seasons firenze” averages 27,100 searches a month. “Four seasons firenze brunch” gets 720, “four seasons firenze ristorante” 320, “four seasons firenze spa” 170 and “four seasons firenze prezzi” 90. For “four seasons firenze camere” Google Ads returns no figure.

Outside Italy the word changes and the pattern holds, in the same public data. In the United Kingdom “the ritz london afternoon tea” gets 27,100 searches a month and “the ritz london rooms” 140. In the United States “caesars palace restaurants” gets 22,200, “caesars palace pool” 8,100, “caesars palace rooms” 3,600 and “caesars palace prices” 2,900.

The measurement has a limit: nearly everyone types the name alone. For the 42 hotels the median is 8,100 searches a month on the name, and the searches with an extra word are a small share. That share still tells you what people expect to find when they reach the site.

Yes: the restaurant and the bar are the parts of a hotel that people search for by their own name. The table sets the searches for four of them beside the searches for the hotel’s name, in the same country.

This is public Google Ads data: the average of September 2025 to August 2026, read on 8 October 2026. The roof terrace of a Milan hotel is searched a little under half as often as the hotel itself. Afternoon tea at the Ritz alone amounts to two thirds of “afternoon tea london”, which gets 40,500 searches a month.

A room has no name anyone types: for “camera deluxe vista lago” (deluxe lake-view room) Google Ads returns no figure. A restaurant has a sign over the door, and people who live in the city can look for it without planning a trip.

No: people who live nearby search for the weather, and people coming from far away search for hotels. We read the searches about St. Moritz in three countries on 8 October 2026.

In Switzerland the weather is searched five times as often as the hotels. In the United States the “luxury” search leads, and the same English phrase gets 90 searches a month in Switzerland. For the website this means the English page and the German page answer different questions: before translating a page, look at what is searched in that language and that country.

A hotel should publish a seasonal page a few weeks before the month in which the searches rise, and that month differs from one search to the next. A twelve-month average hides the season, so read the months one by one.

A mountain spa is searched in autumn, a Tuscan one between December and January. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others in several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging. A page about autumn therefore goes out in summer.

Questions about timing have volumes of their own. In the United States “best time to visit lake como” gets 1,300 searches a month. In Italy “maldive quando andare” (when to go to the Maldives) gets 5,400, more than “resort maldive” at 3,600.

A luxury hotel website should have five kinds of page, one for each way of searching we measured.

Each page answers one search, and each search has one page. In our own hotel guide the program that builds the pages refuses a second page on the same search, even when only the word order changes.

The page most often missing is the one about prices. On 22 August 2026 we mapped the website of a hotel in the top five of The World’s 50 Best Hotels: 75 pages, none on what a night costs. We tell that story in how to get your hotel on ChatGPT and Gemini.

Google’s guidance on helpful, people-first content asks for pages written first of all for people, showing first-hand experience such as having visited a place. On its own restaurant and its own spa, the hotel is the first-hand source. How much the world’s best hotels publish is counted in our article hotel blogs: 340 of 669 top hotels have none.

In a hotel page’s title, put the words the traveller typed first, then the hotel’s name. The title is the line of text the site gives each page, and it usually becomes the clickable line of the result on Google. Google’s guidance on title links asks for text that is descriptive and concise, distinct on every page, with no repeated words and the brand stated briefly.

The brand can sit at the end, briefly, because Google already shows the site name beside each result. Write a word once: the guidance on title links warns that repetition can make the result look like spam.

We did this ourselves. On 7 October 2026 we changed 208 titles in our hotel guide: where a title ran too long we shortened our own brand and kept the searched words, such as “prices”. We have no effect to report yet: as of 8 October one day has passed. Google says it has to read the page again to notice a new title, which can take from a few days to a few weeks.

The hotel keywords not worth chasing are the ones nobody types, the ones with no place in them, and the ones decided outside the website.

The last point is the commonest mistake in keyword lists. In Switzerland “st. moritz wetter”, “st moritz wetter”, “wetter st. moritz” and “wetter st moritz” each show 14,800 searches a month. Google Ads counts a keyword together with its close variants, so the total stays at 14,800. Add them up and you reach 59,200, four times the real number.

It happened to us in September 2026, on a search about weddings in Tuscany: a program that grouped the variants badly made us read 4,060 searches a month where there were 2,420. We caught it because a second check could not find the number again.

SEO is still worth it for a hotel as publishing work: writing the pages that answer real searches. A position is something nobody can promise. Google says so on its page Do you need an SEO?: no one can guarantee a first place on Google, and anyone who does is best left alone.

That applies to us too. On 27 September 2026 we read for the first time where the 13 pages of our hotel guide published by that day stood on Google. None was in the top 30 results for its search. Five of our six searches opened on booking portals and list articles: on those searches a page makes sense only if it compares several hotels.

And a volume tells you only how often people search. Visits depend on where the page stands and on what Google places above the results.

The same pages also serve the assistants, which read the web to answer. In our study of hotels in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini answers, in August 2026, when an answer named one of the world’s 50 best hotels the hotel’s own site was among the links shown in 24% of cases.

We read Google Ads volumes through DataForSEO, a service that lets you query them in bulk. Each figure is the monthly average of the twelve months from September 2025 to August 2026, for one country and one language: the United States and the United Kingdom in English, Italy in Italian, Switzerland in German.

Five limits. Google rounds the figures to fixed steps, so two words showing the same 1,300 may have different true numbers. The lowest figure it returns is 10: where it returns nothing, the searches are few or none. And the 42 hotels were chosen among the five-stars that Google Hotels lists in 12 Italian destinations, with Milan and Rome making up nearly half: another selection would give slightly different counts. We tried only the order “name, then word”. Last, Google Ads does not say who is searching: “hotel spa Dolomiti” is also typed by people who go on to book a three-star.