If you own a riad or guesthouse, chances are almost all of your bookings come through Booking.com, Airbnb, or word of mouth from past guests. That works, but it comes at a cost — 15 to 20% commission on every stay, and zero control over how your property shows up next to a dozen competitors. There's a channel most riad owners never use properly: Google. Travelers search it before they ever open a booking app, and a website that actually ranks for the right searches is the only channel where a booking costs you nothing but the price of the room.
Why most riad websites don't show up on Google
Walk through the websites of ten riads and you'll usually find the same problems: no real website at all (just an Instagram page and a Booking.com listing), a template built for a generic hotel in another country, pages that take 6+ seconds to load on a phone, and zero unique written content beyond a room list. Google has nothing to work with, so it has nothing to rank.
Start with your Google Business Profile
Before touching a website, claim and fully verify your Google Business Profile under the correct category (Guest house or Riad, not just "Hotel"). Upload real photos of every room, the courtyard, the rooftop, and breakfast — listings with more photos consistently get more clicks. Reply to every review, in French, English or Arabic depending on the guest, and keep your address, phone number and hours accurate. For a single property in a specific medina, this alone is often the highest-leverage thing you can do.
Target searches people actually type
Ranking for "riad Marrakech" is close to impossible — you're competing with hundreds of listings and OTAs with decades of authority. What you can win is the long tail: specific phrases with real booking intent that big platforms don't write dedicated pages for.
- riad with rooftop pool in Marrakech medina
- quiet riad near Jemaa el-Fnaa
- family riad with private hammam Fes
- riad with airport pickup Marrakech
- best riad breakfast Marrakech medina
Build pages that answer those searches
A single homepage can't rank for five different phrases. Give your standout amenities their own pages or clearly headed sections — the rooftop pool, the hammam, the courtyard dinners — each with real, specific text (not "luxurious and authentic experience"), the actual neighbourhood name, and photos with descriptive alt text like "riad rooftop pool overlooking Marrakech medina" instead of "IMG_4213.jpg". Link these pages to each other so Google can crawl the whole site easily.
Get reviews, and reply to every one
Fresh, frequent reviews are one of the strongest local ranking signals Google uses, on your website's linked profile and off it. Ask happy guests to leave one before they check out, and reply to each — mentioning your riad's name and neighbourhood naturally in the reply reinforces exactly what you want Google to associate you with.
Add structured data (schema markup)
Adding LodgingBusiness schema markup to your site tells Google directly what you are, where you are, and what you cost — which is what lets a star rating, price range, or address show up right in the search result instead of a plain blue link. It's invisible to guests but it's the difference between a generic listing and one that stands out before anyone even clicks.
List on OTAs, but own your direct channel
This isn't an argument to drop Booking.com or Airbnb — they're still where most first-time guests discover you. The point is to stop being entirely dependent on them. Push repeat guests, referrals, and anyone who finds you organically toward direct booking on your own site, where there's no 15-20% cut going to a platform.
The technical baseline
- Mobile-first layout — most searches happen on a phone, often on slow hotel wifi
- Loads in under 2 seconds
- HTTPS enabled
- Real address and phone number in the footer of every page
- One clear canonical page per language, not duplicate untranslated copies
None of this requires a massive rebuild — it requires a website built with these fundamentals from day one instead of bolted on after the fact. That's exactly what our Tourism & Hospitality catalogue is built around: a fast, mobile-first riad website with the structure above already in place, customised with your branding, photos and content.