If your accommodation website is ranking well and bringing in steady traffic, it can be tempting to scale back marketing efforts. After all, if it is working, why change it?
But the truth is, digital success is never set and forget.
Search engines evolve, guest behaviour shifts, and without regular updates your website will slowly be left behind. In some cases, the decline can be rapid.
Here is a real world example of what happens when optimisation stops — and why ongoing marketing is not a cost, but a necessity.
Real Case: Traffic Crashes When SEO Stops
This graph shows the performance of a property that was on our Boost Direct program for nearly two years. With a newly rebuilt website and consistent blogging, traffic steadily climbed from 1000 to over 1500 monthly visits.
In May 2024, they chose to pause marketing and exit the Boost Direct program.
In the months that followed, traffic dropped from 1500 visits to just 600 per month — a 60 percent loss in organic traffic.
This kind of drop does not just impact visibility. It directly affects bookings, revenue, and long term performance. And it is entirely preventable.
Why Did This Happen?
Search engine optimisation is not a one time task. Here is what stopped when the client ended their marketing:
- No new blog content or landing pages were added
- Technical SEO errors and warnings were no longer monitored or fixed
- Schema markup and location targeting fell out of date
- AI tools and search engines had no new content to discover
- Competitors who continued investing in SEO began to outrank them
To make matters worse, several Google updates rolled out in late 2024 and early 2025. Without ongoing optimisation, the site failed to keep up and its rankings were hit hard.
Google Updates Constantly — And They Matter
On average, Google makes 8 to 12 major algorithm updates per year, along with hundreds of minor changes. These updates often reward:
- Fresh, high quality content
- Mobile first performance
- Structured data and schema
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals
- Authority, trust, and experience signals (known as E E A T)
If your site is not being regularly reviewed and improved, you will not know how these updates are affecting you until the traffic starts to disappear.
AI is Changing Search — Are You Ready?
As tools like ChatGPT, Google SGE, and other AI assistants become more dominant, websites need to be structured in a way that AI can understand and recommend.
If your site is not being updated with the latest formatting, schema, and content structure, it risks being left out of the AI driven discovery process.
This is not just about rankings. It is about future proofing your online visibility.
👉 Learn how to optimise your hotel or resort website for AI tools like ChatGPT and Google SGE
What Boost Direct Includes (and Why It Works)
When you are on our Boost Direct program, you get a complete marketing system — designed to grow bookings and protect your digital presence long term.
Boost Direct includes:
- Monthly audits of your site and rankings
- New blog content based on your target keywords
- Fixes to any SEO errors or performance issues
- Monitoring of Google updates and algorithm shifts
- Paid search campaigns to block OTA brand hijacking
- Email marketing, review response, social media management, and more
It is an all in one system backed by analytics, reporting, and expert execution — with no upfront cost.
👉 Read more about our Bums on Bed Guarantee
The True Cost of Stopping
Cutting marketing might feel like a short term saving, but the long term cost is far higher.
Just like the client in the chart above, traffic can collapse and bookings can suffer. Recovery takes time, investment, and a lot of ground to regain.
Do not let your website performance stall just as the competition heats up.
👉 Book a Boost Direct Strategy Session
👉 Read: Why That Free Website May Be the Most Expensive Decision You Make