How to benefit from the Australian Ski Market

Following on from our post Top 20 Highest Traffic Snowsport Websites in UK we thought we’d flip the hemisphere and check out what sites are top Down Under plus the Australian ski market is big and understanding how to rank for your search terms there is important. Not selling enough “ski jackets online” to the British market in July?! No problem, over 700 Australians are searching for that keyword that month. Selling Canadian ski holidays? Over 200 people a month in Australia are searching for what you are selling.

According to Similar Web, here are the top 20 highest traffic sites Down Under:

1  Ski.com.au

2  Snowjapan.com

3  Powderhounds.com

4  Thredbo.com.au

5  Whitelines.com

6  Mountainwatch.com

7  Newschoolers.com

8  Auski.com.au

9  Snowheads.com

10  Onthesnow.com

11  Mthotham.com.au

12  Onthesnow.com.au

13  Tetongravity.com

14  360Niseko.com

15  Unofficialnetworks.com

16  Nzski.com

17  Coppercolorado.com

18  Cardrona.com

19  Nozawaski.com

20  Fis-Ski.com

It’s unsurprising to see that the top site is a .com.au site (Australian top level domain) as google will give preference to country code TLDs and it’s a tactic that the giant On The Snow uses. In fact ccTLDs (domain endings such as .CO.UK, .CA, etc) are better than using subdomains which are better than directories.

For example if we wanted to rank for ski news down under it would be better to set up snowbistro.com.au than au.snowbistro.com which is better than snowbistro.com/au. However if you want to buy an Australia domain you will be asked to supply an Australian Business Number (ABN) and Australian Company Number (ACN).

Therefore most UK companies either go the subdomain route or the sub-directories route. The disadvantage of subdomains is that they are usually seen as independent entities by google, and the disadvantage of sub-directories for skiing seo is that it adds complexity to the web structure.

The 4th and simplest option, used effectively by a lot of UK ski companies, is to simply create an Australian focussed landing page and get links from Australian regional sites.

Check out our ski SEO packages for more info.