How SEO Turned Snowy Mountains Accommodation Into Jindabyne’s Most Visible Local Booking Brand

This accommodation SEO case study shows how three years of SEO made Snowy Mountains Accommodation the most visible dedicated booking brand for Jindabyne and Snowy Mountains searches, and turned organic search into a growing source of direct bookings.

The Headline Numbers

Background

Snowy Mountains Accommodation, operated by HolidayCo, manages a portfolio of 80+ holiday rental properties across Jindabyne, Crackenback, Berridale and East Jindabyne in the NSW Snowy Mountains — from studio apartments to lakeside houses sleeping up to 13 guests. The business serves two very different peaks: winter visitors heading to Thredbo and Perisher, and a growing summer market of hikers, mountain bikers and “tree change” travellers.

Method Marketing has managed SMA’s SEO and content strategy for several years, with performance tracked through Google Search Console, GA4 and SE Ranking. Two tracking milestones matter for how the numbers below should be read: GA4 e-commerce (booking) tracking on the site went live in December 2023, and organic search reporting through Google Search Console has been continuously connected since May 2024. Figures in this case study are drawn from those points forward, so every trend reflects real, tracked performance rather than an estimate bridging a tracking gap.

The Challenge

Jindabyne’s accommodation market is crowded and highly seasonal. SMA competes directly with dozens of small owner-operated cabin and chalet sites, several larger local agencies (Accommodation Jindabyne, Alpine Country Holidays, Jindabyne Ski Accommodation), and — on the exact same high-intent search terms — global platforms with vastly larger marketing budgets: Booking.com, Airbnb, Tripadvisor and NSW’s own tourism authority.

Winning here meant more than chasing traffic volume. With strong seasonality already driving big swings in search demand between ski season and the shoulder months, the goal was to build durable rankings across the full breadth of the property portfolio — suburb by suburb, feature by feature — and convert that visibility into actual bookings, not just clicks.

Our Approach

Suburb and feature-page architecture

Rather than relying solely on the homepage, SMA’s site was built out with dedicated landing pages for each key suburb (/suburbs/crackenback/, /suburbs/berridale/) and guest-relevant features (/features/pets-welcome/, /features/luxury/). This gives the site multiple, independently-rankable pages for searches like “Crackenback accommodation” and “pet friendly accommodation Jindabyne NSW” rather than forcing every query onto one generic homepage.

Core commercial keyword targeting

A tightly focused set of 43 core commercial search terms is tracked and prioritised — from broad head terms (“jindabyne accommodation”) through to suburb- and feature-level long-tail queries — so that ranking effort maps directly onto the terms guests actually use when they’re ready to book.

Ongoing technical and on-page SEO

Continuous on-page optimisation and technical maintenance keeps 290 pages indexed in Google, supporting a Domain Trust score of 38 — well ahead of most local competitors in this category, who typically sit in the low-to-mid 20s or below.

We didn’t set out to win on raw traffic — Jindabyne’s market is small and brutally seasonal, so the win had to be ranking for the searches that actually convert. Building out suburb and feature pages instead of relying on one homepage is what let us compete for dozens of specific, high-intent terms at once, and it’s a big part of why organic revenue has grown so much faster than organic clicks.

Katie Cowling, Co-Founder & Director of Digital Services, Method Marketing

Key Results

Keyword footprint

SE Ranking’s keyword-database tracking shows the growth in breadth of ranking keywords — a modelled view of how many search terms the domain appears for, independent of the smaller, hand-picked keyword set used for day-to-day rank tracking.

Bookings and revenue

Direct-website booking revenue, verified against SMA’s property management system, is climbing in 2026 after holding roughly flat through 2024–2025 — consistent with the SEO program building toward higher-intent, higher-value searches rather than simply generating more raw visits. 

Out-ranking the local competition

Among the accommodation providers actually competing for the same Jindabyne and Snowy Mountains searches, SMA holds the top visibility share — ahead of every dedicated local agency tracked. Only global OTAs (Booking.com, Airbnb) and the NSW Government’s own tourism site out-rank SMA on a handful of shared terms, which is expected given their scale and isn’t a fair like-for-like comparison.

This has been one of the most satisfying long-term SEO accounts on our books, because the improvement shows up in bookings, not just rankings — that’s the conversation clients actually want to have at review time, and it’s what keeps a portfolio this size competitive against agencies with far bigger budgets.

Angela, Director of Client Services, Method Marketing

Ranking achievements

A sample of core commercial terms currently ranking on page one, drawn from the 43 keywords tracked:

What This Means Going Forward

Three years in, SMA’s organic channel has shifted from a supporting channel to a genuine revenue driver — one that now converts a stable base of search traffic into meaningfully more bookings each year. The next phase of work focuses on the informational content that currently under-performs relative to its potential (guide-style pages like “things to do in Jindabyne” and “best time to visit Snowy Mountains” both rank outside the top 10 today), and on extending the suburb/feature page model to close remaining gaps in the portfolio’s search footprint.

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