ProfileTree, a Belfast-based web design and digital marketing agency, works with hotels and hospitality businesses across Northern Ireland and Ireland to build websites that generate direct bookings. This case study covers a full website redesign and SEO project for Westville Hotel, a four-star boutique property in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. The project delivered 676 organic keywords and top-three search rankings for key transactional terms.
The Challenge Hotels Face Online
The hospitality businesses we work with in Northern Ireland face a problem that gets more expensive every year: heavy reliance on online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Booking.com and Expedia for their bookings. Commission rates typically run between 15 and 25 percent per reservation. For a hotel generating meaningful room revenue, that is a significant margin lost to a third party on every single booking.
The root cause is usually a weak website. When a hotel’s own site is slow, difficult to navigate, or fails to appear in search results for transactional queries — things like ‘hotel in Enniskillen’ or ’boutique hotel Fermanagh’ — guests default to booking platforms they already trust. The hotel pays for the privilege of being found.
A second problem compounds this. Many hotel websites are built on systems the staff cannot update themselves. Content goes stale, seasonal offers are missed, and the site falls further behind in search rankings because it is not being actively maintained. We see this repeatedly when we audit hospitality sites across Northern Ireland.
The combination creates a cycle: poor organic visibility leads to OTA dependency, which means less revenue to reinvest in the website, which maintains poor organic visibility. Breaking that cycle requires a website built on a solid technical foundation, structured for search, and designed so the team can actually use it. For more on how hotels can improve their digital presence, see our guide to marketing strategies for hotel bookings.