SEO for travel and hotels with Topdog

Millions of searches happen on Google in Sweden every single day, and most of them are travel- or hotel-related. According to Google, searches for travel, hotels, car hire and events account for roughly a third of all searches on Google. That makes travel one of the most competitive sectors on Google in 2026. It also means the potential upside is huge. For any company operating in travel or hospitality, traffic from Google is genuinely business-critical. That’s exactly why effective, successful SEO matters so much.

What is SEO for travel and hotels?

What sets travel and hotel SEO apart, above all, is the strong local element in how people search. When people search on Google, they usually include a geographic area in the search term, something like “hotel Stockholm” or “flights to Stockholm”. That means anyone working in travel has to account for these local, area-specific searches. In the SEO industry, this is known as local SEO.

How do you do SEO for hotels and travel?

In travel and hotel SEO, you need to cover a huge range of different searches. After all, there are millions of places in the world people might want to travel to. That means your site needs plenty of different pages to serve all of those visitors.

To succeed with travel and hotel SEO, you need

• The ability to produce content at volume
• Strong UX, to make the SEO and content actually work and to lift conversion
• A really solid technical foundation, since so many of these pages will look alike
• Automation across your site and content: without it, you simply can’t scale your SEO

It’s especially challenging for travel and hotel companies to create unique content for thousands of pages and actually make it work in practice: driving real traffic and real conversions.

These are exactly the kinds of problems Topdog, a Swedish SEO agency, helps its clients solve in the travel segment.

Who does search engine optimization for hotels and travel?

Travel and hotel companies rely on Google to win customers. If you’re not near the top of the search results, you’re fighting an uphill battle, and your company will struggle to grow.

The upside is huge if you actively invest in travel and hotel SEO. Several international companies have grown into major players through Google and AdWords over the past fifteen years, Tripadvisor and Hotels.com among them. Sweden’s own Flygresor.se is a brilliant example right here in Scandinavia.

In Sweden, hotel chains such as Scandic are major players in Google SEO and Google Ads. Tour operators like Apollo, Ving and TUI are big players too. But it’s not just the large hotel chains and tour operators that can benefit from optimising their sites for Google. Local hotels have real potential to attract traffic from Google as well, since their homepage, usually their strongest page, can do the heavy lifting to rank highly.

What sets SEO for travel and hotel sites apart?

There’s one factor working against the travel industry on Google: Google itself has a built-in feature that lets users book things like hotels and flights directly. When someone searches for “hotel Stockholm”, for example, a search form pops up in the results, with Google showing cheap hotels in Stockholm right there. This feature is called Google Travel. Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like.

That means you’re competing with Google itself. This feature pushes the organic results further down the page, taking the click-through rate down with it.

Another feature of SEO in the travel industry is just how large these sites tend to be. That calls for real expertise in technology, automation and scaling. It also means the SEO agency delivering the work needs a strong ability to drive change alongside the client’s tech team.

How are SEO projects measured in the travel and hotel industry?

For search engine optimization of travel and hotel sites, traffic and the number of bookings are the main KPIs. Large companies like Flygresor.se, however, primarily track the number of clicks going to their advertisers. In Flygresor’s case, that’s because it operates as a super affiliate: it has no products of its own, and instead sends traffic on to the big online travel agencies.

Strategy for travel SEO

An SEO strategy for travel should cover the following:

• How you create content for large numbers of similar landing pages
• How user experience, technical SEO and conversion combine to create successful pages
• How you build a technical infrastructure that supports thousands of converting landing pages
• How you coordinate SEO with other forms of digital marketing