The Hotel Guru: From Algorithm Penalty to 141% Visibility Growth
The Hotel Guru
How we recovered The Hotel Guru from devastating algorithm updates to achieve 56% traffic growth, 118% conversion rate increase, and successful international expansion to Germany with 18,000 translated pages.
Organic Visibility Growth
AHREFs visibility data captured April 2026 (showing July 2019 onwards)
"Melt Digital's work allows us to compete with and even beat brands that have much larger budgets. We've worked with Melt for seven years on multiple projects, and their results make it easy to say yes when they come to us with suggestions for growing our traffic and revenue. What makes the Melt team different is their critical thinking and attention to detail. Everything they do is based on thoughtful, rigorous analysis of data, which gives us certainty that their recommendations will work. We are very happy to recommend them."Hugh Graham-Watson — Managing Director, The Hotel Guru
The Challenge
The Hotel Guru experienced a dramatic decrease in traffic over a couple of years and showed no sign of improving. Upon initial investigation, we discovered that the drop correlated with two Google algorithm updates. We were engaged to own the company's SEO channel, and have been retained for six years and counting.
The Work
We've further supported the site's SEO growth by creating an optimisation strategy to capture market share in the US, and Australia for competitive destinations, revealing the best keyword targets at scale to meet global search demand. In 2023 we launched THG in Germany, automating the translation of 18,000 pages of content into German and optimising for the German search market, additionally helping create a framework for successful launch by THG in France in 2024.
The Outcome
The Hotel Guru's flagship UK site has seen year-on-year growth of 56% from organic traffic thanks to our sustained SEO support, and visibility has more than doubled. Our focus on whole-site content experiences and helpful content has also had benefits beyond pure SEO metrics: our recommendations for site architecture and UX have directly led to a 118% increase in conversion rate and reduced bounce rate by 36%.
Key Results
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