Nine reviews. One hundred ninety-one hiding behind an old name.
The Plymouth is a good product in the best block of the Loop. Google still thinks it's a Sonder. The site tells search engines every page is the homepage. Nobody is measuring anything. This page shows exactly where the bookings are leaking and what we'd do about it, in order.
Sources: Google Maps live 11 Sep 2026 · Ahrefs 11 Sep 2026 · live crawl 11 Sep 2026.
The product is not the problem.
Most audits start with what's broken. This one starts with what you already have, because it is the raw material for everything after it.
The new Google profile sits at 5.0 across nine reviews. The four-bedroom Airbnb listing is 4.91 with cleanliness and location both at 5.0. The one-line summary on that listing is that it "works well for groups." That is the whole pitch, in your guests' words.
Server response is about 150 milliseconds. Desktop performance scores 98 out of 100. Lighthouse SEO scores 100 on both mobile and desktop. Structured data exists (Hotel, FAQ, breadcrumbs). The bones are modern. The problems are configuration, not platform.
"Chicago Has Hotels. Plymouth Is Different." Full kitchens, private bedrooms behind real doors, sleeps up to eight, self check-in, Printer's Row. Nothing on the competitor set says this as clearly. The copy needs proof under it, not a rewrite.
Chicago drew 56.8 million visitors in 2025, a record. Summer 2025 hotel room nights grew 4.3 percent while the US market shrank. The Marathon (Oct 11, about 60,000 runners), PACK EXPO (Oct 18 to 21, 77,000), and RSNA (Nov 29 to Dec 3) all land in the next ninety days. Groups need beds. You have the right ones.
Google still thinks you're a Sonder.
Sonder ceased operations on 10 Nov 2025. The building relaunched independently around April 2026. The internet has not caught up, and right now the old identity is outranking the new one on the searches that matter most.
A Google Maps search for "apartment hotel chicago loop" returns "Sonder The Plymouth Apartments Loop" at 3.9 stars, 191 reviews, with a Boston phone number. It does not return "The Plymouth Chicago." The new profile has nine reviews. The old one has the history, the ranking, and a rating that reads as a warning. Every searcher who lands on it sees a defunct brand and a 3.9.
Recreated from Google Maps, 11 Sep 2026. Only the left listing appeared for "apartment hotel chicago loop."
"sonder chicago" gets about 700 searches a month. "sonder the plymouth" gets about 100. The Sonder name was bought out of bankruptcy and sonder.com relaunched in July 2026 as an affiliate site. It now has a page for "The Plymouth Chicago" showing 9.1 out of 10 and a nightly rate, and it routes the booking to Booking.com, Vrbo and Expedia. Someone else is collecting commission on your returning guests.
Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Trip.com (7.9 out of 10, 395 reviews) and Yelp all still carry the Sonder-era listing. The new TripAdvisor listing has exactly one review, a 1.0, and sits 64th of 71 in its category. Two of your three Airbnb listings carry Airbnb's "bottom 10 percent" flag. The Facebook page is titled "The Plymouth" with no activity. None of these are hard to fix. All of them are costing you bookings this week.
The site tells Google every page is the homepage.
The build is Next.js and it is quick. The configuration has five errors that quietly cancel the SEO value of every page except the homepage. These are one-day fixes for a developer who knows what to look for.
| Finding | What we saw | Why it matters | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canonical tag on every page points to the homepage | All 8 inner pages declare https://www.theplymouthchicago.com as their canonical URL | Rooms, Location, FAQ and the three suite pages are telling Google "index the homepage instead of me." They cannot rank. | Critical |
| Sitemap is 4 of 9 broken | /rooms/2-bedroom, /rooms/3-bedroom, /rooms/4-bedroom and /contact all return 404. The live suite pages (/rooms/2br, /3br, /4br) and /terms are not in the sitemap at all | Google is being sent to pages that don't exist and not told about the ones that do | Critical |
| No analytics of any kind | No GA4, no Tag Manager, no Meta pixel, no session recording. Zero tags on the page | You cannot see where visitors come from, what they click, or where they abandon the booking. Every decision is a guess | Critical |
| Title tags double the brand | Inner pages render as "... | The Plymouth Chicago | The Plymouth Chicago" (up to 89 characters) | Truncated in search results and reads as a bug to anyone who notices | High |
| Mobile LCP 5.1 seconds | Lighthouse mobile: performance 80, Largest Contentful Paint 5.1s, Speed Index 3.8s. Desktop LCP is 1.0s | Google's threshold is 2.5s. The hero image is a 1280px JPEG stretched to 1744px, and homepage images total 2.5MB across 16 files with no WebP or AVIF. Est. savings 418 KB | High |
| Homepage suite cards don't link to suite pages | All three "View Suite" buttons go to /rooms, not /rooms/2br, /3br, /4br | The pages built to convert a 2-bedroom searcher get no internal links | High |
| No aggregate rating in structured data | Hotel schema exists but carries no review rating. Schema also says 19 rooms while the page says 18 | No stars in search results. The room count mismatch is a trust signal to Google and to guests | Medium |
| Duplicate H1s and reused descriptions | /rooms and /rooms/4br each have two H1 tags. The 2br and 3br pages share one generic meta description | Diluted page focus, weaker snippets | Medium |
| No favicon | /favicon.ico returns 404 | Blank icon in browser tabs and in Google's mobile results | Medium |
| 317 KB logo | The logo PNG is 673x684 and 317 KB, displayed at 59x60 | Largest single file on the page is a logo | Medium |
Live crawl and Google PageSpeed Insights lab run, 11 Sep 2026. Field data (real-user Core Web Vitals) is not available for this domain, meaning traffic is below Google's reporting threshold.
Your homepage and your terms page disagree on six things.
A group of eight books because the homepage says free cancellation. The terms page says non-refundable. That gap is a chargeback, a one-star review, or both. Here is every conflict we found, verbatim.
| Topic | Homepage / FAQ says | Room pages / Terms say |
|---|---|---|
| Cancellation | "Free cancellation up to 48 hours before check-in for most bookings." | "Non-refundable. All cancellations forfeit the full reservation amount." |
| Pets | "Select suites are pet-friendly (dogs under 50 lbs)." | "No pets." |
| Check-in | "Check-in starts at 3pm." | "Check-in: 4:00 PM." |
| Four-bedroom capacity | "Sleeps 8" | "Up to 10 guests" |
| Security deposit | Not mentioned anywhere | "$250 security deposit is required before check-in" plus ID, matching card and a verification portal |
| Walk times | Millennium Park 5 min, Art Institute 8 min | Millennium Park 10 min, Art Institute 12 min |
Pick one answer per row. Put it everywhere. This is a half-day of work and it removes the single most common reason a group stay turns into a dispute.
Three keywords. All of them are your own name.
Ahrefs shows the domain ranking for exactly three terms: "plymouth chicago," "plymouth hotel chicago" and "the plymouth chicago." That is about 50 visits a month, every one of them someone who already knew you existed. Nobody searching for what you sell can find you.
The searches you should own
| Search term | Monthly volume | Difficulty (0 to 100) | Who ranks today |
|---|---|---|---|
| extended stay chicago | 900 | 1 | Extended Stay America, OTAs |
| sonder chicago | 700 | 2 | sonder.com (affiliate), CBS News closure story |
| chicago bachelorette party | 450 | 1 | Listicles, no lodging |
| hotel suites chicago | 400 | 6 | The Gwen, City Suites (DR 19, position 3) |
| corporate housing chicago | 400 | 2 | Corporate housing brokers |
| extended stay hotels chicago | 300 | 2 | Chains, OTAs |
| hotels in the loop chicago | 250 | 17 | OTAs, chains |
| chicago hotels with kitchen | 200 | 0 | OTAs |
| hotel with kitchen chicago | 200 | n/a | OTAs |
| family suites chicago | 150 | n/a | Chains |
| apartment hotel chicago | 150 | 1 | Level (DR 46, position 1), Kasa |
| furnished apartments chicago short term | 150 | 4 | Blueground, brokers |
| 2 bedroom suites chicago | 100 | 1 | Park Hyatt, Suiteness, Residence Inn Loop |
| chicago apartment hotel | 100 | 0 | Level, a DR 0 directory at position 5 |
| aparthotel chicago | 100 | 1 | Directories |
| 2 bedroom hotel suites chicago | 90 | 0 | Residence Inn Loop |
| boutique hotels chicago loop | 40 | 12 | Listicles |
Ahrefs, US, 11 Sep 2026. Difficulty under 10 means a well-built page on a clean domain can rank inside a quarter.
A DR 19 site (City Suites) holds position 3 for "hotel suites chicago." A DR 0 directory holds position 5 for "chicago apartment hotel." Level Chicago, DR 46, holds position 1 for "apartment hotel chicago" with a single city page. This category is not owned by anyone with real authority. The pages just don't exist on your domain yet.
380 domains link to the site. We reviewed the top 70 by authority. Every one is a throwaway SEO-vendor domain (names like "fiverr-affordable-seo-services.site" and "buyseobacklinks.shop"), and every one first appeared after 28 Mar 2026. Domain rating is still zero, so the links did nothing, but a profile like this is a manual-action risk. Whether it was bought or aimed at you, it needs a disavow file filed with Google before we build anything on top of it.
Who a group of eight sees before they see you.
We benchmarked the six properties a family, a bachelorette group, or a relocating executive actually compares you against when they search for multi-bedroom space downtown.
| Property | Area | Largest unit | Google rating | Domain rating | Ranking keywords | Shows rates on site | Direct-booking hook | Content |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Plymouth Chicago | Printer's Row | 4BR, sleeps 8 to 10 | 5.0 (9) / old profile 3.9 (191) | 0 | 3 | No, dates only | "Best rate guaranteed," unproven | None |
| Kasa South Loop | South Loop | 2BR | 4.8 (566) | 68 | 1,300 | After dates | Rate match guarantee, special-rate codes | Brand blog, city guides |
| Level Fulton Market | West Loop | 3BR + penthouse | TripAdvisor 3.7 (38) | 46 | 899 | After dates | Illinois resident discount up to 20%, dining credit | Chicago travel guide |
| Sentral Michigan Avenue | Loop | 2BR | 4.7 (1,304) | n/a | n/a | Google shows from $262 | Flexible-stay pricing | Neighborhood pages |
| Residence Inn Downtown/Loop | Loop | 2BR, sleeps up to 8 | TripAdvisor 4.5 (714) | 92 (Marriott) | Ranks #5 for "2 bedroom suites chicago" | After dates | Bonvoy member rate | Marriott brand |
| Hotel Blake (next door) | Printer's Row | Suites | 4.6 (281) | n/a | n/a | After dates | Hilton Vacation Club | Brand |
| Embassy Suites Mag Mile | Streeterville | 2-room suites | TripAdvisor 4.1 (4,976) | n/a | n/a | After dates | Free breakfast, evening reception | Brand |
Google ratings from Google Maps live, 11 Sep 2026. Domain metrics from Ahrefs. TripAdvisor used where a Google profile was not retrievable.
Residence Inn is the only competitor that says a number. You have the largest true multi-bedroom inventory in the Loop and the site buries it under "2, 3 & 4 bedroom."
Kasa runs sponsored placements on "apartment hotel chicago loop" and holds a 4.8 across 566 reviews. They win on trust volume. You win on product. The gap is reviews, not rooms.
Rate match, resident discount, dining credit, loyalty points. Your site says "best rate guaranteed" while sonder.com is quoting a rate for your building. The claim needs to be true and visible.
Nine reviews on the profile that matters. One review on TripAdvisor, and it's a one.
Reviews
The site links to a "Leave a Google Review" page and shows three testimonials with initials. There is no post-stay review request in the guest flow we could find, and no review widget on the site. Reviews are the single input that moves ranking, conversion, and rate at the same time. Right now they arrive by accident.
Social
Instagram @plymouthchicago posts professional interior photography every few weeks. The last post was about two weeks old at the time of this audit. The bio says "30 stylish apartments." The website says 18 suites. A guest reading both is confused before they book.
No TikTok. No active Facebook. No creator or guest content anywhere. Meanwhile, the Google result for "hotel suites chicago" now includes Instagram Reels, one of them a creator touring Level's two-bedroom suite. Groups of six to eight are booked by the person in the group who found the Reel.
Your rooms have custom murals, city views, and a rooftop. That is a content engine that has never been turned on.
"Best rate guaranteed," but no rate.
We walked the booking path the way a group organizer would. Four things stop the click.
Every competitor except one hides rates too, but they have hundreds of reviews doing the trust work instead. With nine reviews, an organizer who cannot see a per-night or per-person number has nothing to bring back to the group chat.
A $250 security deposit, ID upload, and a verification portal appear only on the terms page, mirrored from the booking engine. Group bookers find out after they have committed. That is where the one-star reviews start.
No star rating, no review count, no press, no logos. Three testimonials with initials. The homepage asks a stranger to trust a scarcity line ("18 Suites. They Go Fast.") before it has given them a single reason to.
The homepage links every suite to the same /rooms list. The individual 2br, 3br, 4br pages have no internal links, no reviews, no floor plan, no sqft, and canonical tags that hand their ranking to the homepage.
None of this needs a redesign. It needs the booking engine's data (rates, availability, reviews) surfaced on the pages people actually land on.
In order. Nothing before its prerequisite.
This is the work we would do, in the sequence we would do it. Each phase unlocks the next. No phase is optional if the goal is to fill 18 suites from direct bookings instead of from Airbnb and a defunct brand's affiliate page.
Stop the bleeding.
Remove every error that is actively costing bookings today.
- Fix canonical tags so every page canonicals to itself
- Rebuild the sitemap with the nine live URLs and nothing else, and build the missing /contact page
- Correct the doubled title tags, duplicate H1s, and generic descriptions
- Install GA4 and Tag Manager, and wire booking-engine events (date search, room view, checkout start, confirmation) so we can see the funnel
- Reconcile the six policy contradictions and publish one answer everywhere, including the booking engine
- File a disavow list for the spam backlink profile
- Convert the 16 homepage images to WebP at correct dimensions, replace the 317 KB logo, add a favicon
- Update the Instagram bio, the schema room count, and the site to one unit number
Own your own name.
Make “The Plymouth Chicago” the only result for anyone searching the building, old name or new.
- Claim the Sonder Google profile, mark it as the same business under the new name, and request review consolidation so the 191 reviews carry over rather than compete
- Claim or correct the Sonder-era listings on Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Retire what cannot be claimed
- Publish a "Formerly Sonder The Plymouth" page targeting the 800 monthly searches for the old name, and pitch a correction to the sonder.com affiliate listing
- Launch a post-stay review flow inside the booking engine's messaging: Google first, Airbnb second, TripAdvisor third, timed to check-out
- Add a live review widget and aggregate rating schema to the homepage and every suite page
- Rescue the two flagged Airbnb listings: accuracy pass on photos, capacity, and the climate-control disclosure that is driving the accuracy score down
Own the category.
Rank for the seventeen searches in section 05, none of which currently belong to anyone with authority.
- Rebuild the three suite pages as landing pages: floor plan, sqft, "sleeps" number, per-person math, reviews, what's in the kitchen, and a booking widget
- Build intent pages the competitors don't have: "hotels in Chicago that sleep 8," "bachelorette suites in the Loop," "extended stay Chicago Loop," "corporate housing near the Loop," "where to stay for the Chicago Marathon," "McCormick Place group lodging"
- Printer's Row neighborhood guide and a restaurant and bar guide, replacing the current list of five names with something worth linking to
- Event calendar pages tied to the McCormick compression dates and the big summer weekends, refreshed each season
- Digital PR to the outlets that write "where to stay with a group in Chicago" and rank for it: Block Club, Time Out, Chicago Magazine, Six Suitcase Travel
- Monthly technical monitoring so the canonical and sitemap errors never come back
Fill the calendar.
Turn the fixed foundation into direct bookings on the dates that matter.
- Paid search on the high-intent cluster only (suites, kitchen, sleeps, extended stay, bachelorette), sized to the 18-suite inventory and paused when sold out
- Meta and Instagram retargeting for date searchers who did not book, with the deposit and cancellation terms stated up front
- A real direct-booking reason: one visible, honest advantage over the OTA rate, stated on every page and matched in the booking engine
- Pre-arrival and post-stay email: house guide, upsells for early check-in and late check-out, review request, return-stay offer
- Corporate and relocation outreach to Loop employers and the relocation firms that book 30-plus-night stays
- A content cadence for Instagram and one short-form channel: rooms, rooftop, murals, guest groups, neighborhood, all shot on site
- Monthly reporting: direct bookings, OTA share, review velocity, rankings on the seventeen terms, and cost per direct booking
The order matters. Paid traffic to a site with a 3.9 Sonder listing above it and a booking flow that hides the deposit is money spent making the problem faster.
Twenty minutes. We'll walk you through it.
This audit is free and it's yours regardless. If you want the plan turned into a schedule with owners and dates, that's the conversation.