01 // DEMAND
Seasonal & Stacked
Travel demand spikes in predictable windows, but planning starts months earlier. SEO has to serve both the dreamer and the booker — the same keyword means different things in March vs. September.
Search is how travelers plan — and how AI models recommend. I build organic visibility that captures demand across the entire travel decision journey, from first dream to final booking.
Specialized SEO for destination marketing organizations, independent hotels, resorts, and tourism boards that want to rank where it matters — in Google, in AI answer engines, and in the traveler's mind.
Travel queries are uniquely emotional, seasonal, and competitive. A destination isn't a product — it's a promise. Ranking for "things to do in Aspen" means competing with TripAdvisor, Fodor's, The Points Guy, and a dozen AI-generated itineraries. Winning requires a discipline that understands both search engines and the traveler's actual journey.
Travel demand spikes in predictable windows, but planning starts months earlier. SEO has to serve both the dreamer and the booker — the same keyword means different things in March vs. September.
Inspiration → research → planning → booking. Each stage needs different content, different pages, different signals. Lumping them together is why most destination sites underperform.
You're competing with massive domains and increasingly with AI-generated answers. Winning demands entity SEO, structured data, and content with genuine local authority AI models want to cite.
Every engagement blends these disciplines to match where your site's actually losing visibility — and where it can realistically win.
Destination websites are typically large, CMS-driven, and full of legacy structure. Technical debt is the silent killer — crawl traps, duplicate region pages, slow Core Web Vitals, broken schema, orphaned content.
Comprehensive audits using Screaming Frog, GSC, GA4, Cloudflare logs, and custom crawls — surfacing the specific fixes that unlock visibility most efficiently.
The best destination sites aren't brochures — they're trusted travel planners. I map the traveler's full decision journey to keyword clusters and content formats that match intent at every stage.
Editorial calendars, itinerary frameworks, neighborhood guides, seasonal content, and topical authority that earns the featured snippet and the AI citation.
For hotels, resorts, and partner businesses, local SEO is the pipeline. For DMOs, it's the foundation of the destination brand in maps, AI Overviews, and "near me" searches.
Google Business Profile strategy, local citation ecosystems, review velocity, local link building, and schema that makes a destination's entity graph unmistakable.
Travelers now plan with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. If your destination isn't being cited, your competitor is. Answer Engine Optimization is the new front line.
As lead of the AI Market Check practice at Miles Partnership, I track citation share across AI models for destinations and hotels — then engineer content structure, schema, and authority to earn those mentions.
Rankings are vanity. Revenue, room nights, and visitor center conversions are reality. I build reporting that ties SEO to destination KPIs boards actually care about.
GA4, Looker Studio, BrightEdge, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and custom log analysis — distilled into dashboards that show what's moving, what's not, and why.
The organizations that shape how people travel — and the businesses that host them.
Destination marketing organizations, CVBs, and tourism boards — city, state, regional, and national.
Independent hotels, boutique properties, and regional hotel groups looking to reduce OTA dependence.
Ski resorts, beach resorts, casino properties, and destination resorts with complex booking paths.
Museums, parks, wineries, and experiential attractions competing for planning-stage visibility.
Every engagement begins with understanding the place — not just the site.
Deep audit of the destination, the brand, the competitive set, and the current organic footprint across Google, maps, and AI engines. Stakeholder interviews surface what rankings alone won't tell you.
Prioritized roadmap — what's blocking growth, what's leaking authority, and what's already working that we can amplify. Ranked by impact and effort.
Technical fixes, content frameworks, schema, authority building. Direct work with dev teams, content editors, and PR — not a handoff and hope.
Reporting tied to destination KPIs — room nights, partner referrals, visitor center conversions, AI citation share. Boards get a story, not a spreadsheet.
Destination SEO is specialized search engine optimization for places — cities, regions, resorts, and tourism brands. It blends local SEO, travel content strategy, and technical SEO to help travelers discover a destination throughout the entire decision journey, from dreaming to booking.
DMO SEO has to serve a complex audience — leisure travelers, meeting planners, media, and local stakeholders — while ranking for high-intent queries like "things to do in [destination]" against OTAs, listicles, and other powerful domains. It requires deep travel content expertise, entity SEO, schema for events and attractions, and strong local signals.
Yes. Independent hotels, resorts, and hospitality brands benefit from focused SEO — ranking for unbranded destination queries, optimizing booking-intent pages, building topical authority around the guest experience, and reducing reliance on OTAs.
AEO is optimizing content so that AI-driven search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini — cite your destination or brand in their answers. It's increasingly essential for travel, where travelers now ask AI for itineraries, hotels, and things to do.
Technical fixes often show impact within weeks. Content and authority work generally compounds over 3–9 months. For competitive destination queries, expect 6–12 months to see meaningful ranking and traffic gains, though early wins on long-tail queries come much sooner.
Beyond rankings, I report on organic sessions from target visitor segments, engaged visits to booking-intent pages, visitor-center conversions, partner referral clicks, AI citation frequency, and — where attributable — economic impact and room nights driven through organic.
Whether you lead a DMO, run a hotel group, or market a resort — if organic isn't pulling its weight, something specific is broken. Let's find it.