Turning an SEO “Impossible” Into Record-Breaking Growth

The most impactful experience of my career happened while working for a well-known hotel franchisor. I joined in 2006 as Manager of SEO with a very specific challenge: explain to 5,600 franchise owners why none of their properties were showing up on page one of Google search results.

For context, more than 85% of search engine click-throughs happen on the first page. That can mean the difference between hundreds of monthly organic visits and tens of thousands—traffic that directly drives conversions and revenue. Page-one visibility is a big deal.

A Mandate to Communicate, Not to Fix

Interestingly, I wasn’t initially hired to solve the problem. Leadership believed it couldn’t be fixed. My job was essentially damage control—help the franchisees understand why.

But as I dug into the data, I found a site that ranked for virtually nothing outside of branded terms. Only people already aware of the hotel brands could find it. Basic technical SEO best practices had been missed entirely. Without a massive redesign, there was no chance of meaningful improvement.

Even if we corrected the issues, the corporate site’s single-domain structure meant that only one listing could realistically appear for any given search. With ten unique hotel brands competing in almost every major U.S. city, that single listing wasn’t nearly enough.

The Breakthrough Strategy

After many late-night brainstorms and long discussions with my director, I mapped out a solution:

• Create separate branded domains so each hotel brand could rank independently.
• Develop city-level landing pages on the corporate domain, each listing all brand properties in that city to capture valuable generic searches like “hotels in Phoenix.”

That strategy would give us eleven opportunities (10 for each brand and 1 for the corporate website) to rank on page one instead of just one. Elegant in concept—enormous in execution.

Convincing leadership wasn’t easy. It took weeks of meetings and detailed revenue projections before we got the green light. Even then, our CEO suddenly cut the timeline from six months to four. The pressure was on.

Launch, Panic, and Patience

When we launched, traffic dropped nearly 50% within the first week, significantly more than expected. Because most traffic was branded, revenue didn’t fall as sharply, but the optics were still alarming. Two, three, four weeks passed with no recovery. By week six, nerves were fraying. I asked my wife if we were going to be ok if it didn’t go our way? She reminded me that I have been here before and to just stay true to my plan, and if not, we will be fine.

Industry best practice predicted a four-to-six-week recovery, so with a new found resolve, I urged the team to stay the course. Still, it was tense. Each of my superiors asked if we had miscalculated.

Eight Weeks to Proof

Finally, in week eight, the results arrived. Multiple branded sites started appearing on page one for their own branded + city terms. Then we struck gold! Generic searches like “hotel rooms in Los Angeles” and “hotels in Phoenix.” Those searches drive 10–20 times the volume of branded searches.

Soon we were seeing three, four, even five different listings from several of the branded sites on page one for key city queries, sometimes alongside our city-level landing pages. We didn’t just meet our projections—we crushed them, and competitors were left scrambling.

Recognition and Lasting Impact

The success was so dramatic that the company rewarded our team with stock options—something rarely offered below director level—and even sent my family on an all-expenses-paid vacation. By 2008, organic search revenue had grown from $56 million to over $247 million annually. In 2012 the company celebrated hitting the one-billion-dollar mark in organic revenue.

Eventually, Google adjusted its algorithm to throttle our dominance by pushing some of our listings to page two. Even so, we maintained a commanding presence and a record of performance that far exceeded the original goal.

The Final Takeaway

What started as a role focused on “damage control” turned into one of the most transformative SEO successes of my career. It reinforced a principle I carry into every project: with the right strategy, persistence, and willingness to challenge assumptions, even the most “impossible” problems can become industry-defining wins.