This month we opened, one by one, the websites of 44 hotels in Cancún. We didn’t cherry-pick them: they’re the ones that appear on Google Maps with their own page. We left out the chains —Wyndham, Ramada, OYO— because those sites aren’t decided by the hotel, and measuring them says nothing about the work you could actually do here.
Eight of the forty-four don’t even open. The Google listing has a URL, people tap it, and they get an error: page not found, request denied, or a domain that no longer exists.
Of the 36 that do load, only five are clean on the five checks we ran. One in seven.
Below are the five, with the numbers we found and —this is the important part— how to check each one on your own site without tools and without paying anyone. You don’t need to be technical. These are things you can see.
1. Make sure the site actually opens
Fails in 8 of 44. It’s the costliest mistake and the easiest to fix, and most of the time no one knows it’s there: the owner gets to the site by typing the URL from memory, or from an old link, and it works. The one that doesn’t work is the link they put on Google six years ago.
How to check it: search for your business on Google from your phone, in an incognito window, and tap the link on your listing. Don’t type the address: tap it from there, which is what a customer does. If you get an error, now you know where they’re slipping away.
2. Make sure the padlock shows
Fails in 6 of 36. Without a certificate, the browser shows “Not secure” next to your address. On a site where people look at a room and leave an email or a card, that warning stops a lot of people who will never tell you why they didn’t book.
One of the six is worth calling out because it’s common: it does have a certificate, but its old non-HTTPS address doesn’t redirect to the right one. And the old one is exactly what’s set on Google. In other words, they paid for the expensive part and are missing the switch.
How to check it: look at the address bar. If it starts with http:// and not https://, you’re missing it. And even if https:// works, test the old version too: if that one doesn’t auto-jump to the secure one, your visitor still sees the warning.
3. Make your title say what you are and where you are
Fails in 6 of 36: one has no title at all and five have one, but don’t say where they are. The title is that blue line Google shows, and it’s also what appears on the browser tab. We found one that just says “Welcome to…”, another left as Hotel-mexico4, and one that literally says Bot Verification: a security screen that got stuck and nobody ever checked.
The deeper issue is bigger and more common: people aren’t searching for your name. They search for “hotel in downtown Cancún”, “hotel near the Hotel Zone”, “where to stay in Cancún cheap”. If your title doesn’t say what you are and where you are, you’re competing without introducing yourself.
How to check it: open your site and read the browser tab. Does it say what you are and in which city? If it says “Home” or just the name, you’ve got work to do.
4. Write the bottom paragraph yourself
Fails in 7 of 36, and 6 also lack a main heading. Under the blue line, Google shows a gray paragraph. If you provide one, it shows yours. If not, it snips any stray line from the page —a cookie notice, a menu, half a sentence— and uses it as bait. It usually looks awful, and it’s the only thing many people read before deciding whether to click.
How to check it: search your business on Google and read that gray paragraph. Does it make sense? Does it invite a click? Or is it a chunk of text cut in half?
5. Make sure Google knows you speak other languages
Fails in 29 of 36. By far the biggest gap: eight out of ten hotels in Cancún sell in a single language. In a city that lives off international visitors.
And it’s worth clarifying what we measured, because it’s not what it seems. It’s not “not having the site in English.” It’s subtler: even if you have an English version, you need a signal in the code that tells Google that page and the Spanish one are the same, in two languages. Without that signal, your two versions don’t add up: they compete with each other, and Google picks one and buries the other.
The stat that stood out the most: 19 of the 36 are fine on everything else and only fail here. It’s not general neglect. It’s a specific blind spot, and it’s what separates a hotel that gets direct bookings from the United States and Canada from one that only gets them on commission.
How to check it: search for your hotel on Google from an English connection, or ask someone abroad to do it. If your English version never appears, or the Spanish one shows up instead, the signal isn’t set.
What this review does NOT say
None of these hotels is empty because of this. They fill up via Booking, agencies, corporate deals, and their reviews, which is exactly what they’ve been doing well for years. This review doesn’t measure whether a hotel is good or whether it’s doing well.
It measures one thing: how many people can reach you on their own, without paying commission per night. And over a year, that difference isn’t small.
That’s why we’re not naming names. They’re local businesses, neighbors, and the point holds up in aggregate. Calling them out one by one helps no one.
And this isn’t just about hotels
The same five checks apply to a dental practice, a real estate agency, a law firm, or a restaurant. The sector changes, not the problem: most of the time the site was built once, handed off, and since then no one has looked at it from the path a customer takes when they don’t know you yet.
Ask yourself the five questions with your own site open. It’s ten minutes and you don’t need anyone.
Versión en español: Los cinco errores de SEO que cometen los hoteles de Cancún
