Organic

Ski Beat

+87% organic revenue

How we helped Ski Beat outrank far bigger rivals and grow organic revenue by 87%, building topical authority across ski chalet search.

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Organic revenue (peak ski season, YoY)

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Organic impressions (YoY)

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Page-one keywords

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Purchases from organic search

The Challenge

What we were up against

Ski Beat had a solid reputation as a catered ski chalet operator, but their organic presence told a different story. Almost all of their search visibility came from branded and location-based queries, the searches made by people who already knew them. For the product-level keywords that actually bring in new customers, they were barely showing up at all.

The site wasn't built to compete in the SERPs either. Ski Beat had only a few location pages, no commercial landing pages targeting the terms people use when they're ready to book, and structured data had never been set up, which was holding back how well search engines could read and index the site.

All of this sat in a category dominated by well-funded operators like Crystal Ski and Ski World.

The wider picture made it harder still. Rising AI Overviews, falling click-through rates and the growth of zero-click search meant chasing rankings alone was never going to be enough. And there was a perception problem to solve: a whole younger audience had simply never considered a catered chalet, assuming it was out of their budget next to a self-catered hotel room.

The objective was clear and commercial. Grow organic revenue meaningfully, with a target of 10% to cover pre-paid chalet rooms the client had already committed to selling, grow traffic and visibility across both search and AI despite those headwinds, and build Ski Beat into a genuine topical authority in the ski chalet space.

Our Approach

How we tackled it

We built the strategy around two clear audiences, Ski Beat's existing chalet-lovers actively searching for their next trip, and that younger audience who needed a reason to consider a catered chalet.

The first was a major expansion of bottom-of-funnel landing pages. Ski Beat only had location pages, so we created new commercial pages, every one chosen on keyword volume data, covering ground that had never been targeted before. These ranged from seasonal searches like "January ski chalet holidays" to broader terms like small ski chalets and niche ones like ski chalets with hot tubs.

The second was resort guides built around research-stage queries such as Val Thorens ski resort guide, pulling in early planners and building topical authority. The third was educational content, including an honest catered chalet versus hotel comparison, aimed squarely at changing the minds of that younger audience. And the fourth was AI visibility, building content specifically designed to align with how AI platforms surface answers, and building authority around it.

On the technical side we implemented structured data across the whole site for the first time, helping search engines properly read and index the content. To keep all of this manageable within the retainer, we leaned on two tools we built in-house.

Atlas, our technical audit platform, runs automated crawls, flags issues and tracks fixes, so technical health stays monitored without manual audits eating into the hours.

Lumin, our LLM visibility tracker, monitors how Ski Beat is referenced across AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, including brand sentiment and competitor comparisons.

One moment summed up the quality of the work. We spotted a completely unsolicited backlink from Forbes in our reports. Their editorial team had found our Val Thorens resort guide and referenced it in a January 2026 article on Alpine property investment, with zero outreach from us.

The Results

What we achieved

The headline target was 10% organic revenue growth. We didn't get close to it, we blew past it. Across the peak ski season, organic revenue grew by 87% year on year, which in turn contributed to a 56% rise in the website's overall revenue.

The visibility gains behind that were just as striking:

•Organic impressions up 105% year-on-year
•Organic clicks still up year on year despite a 47% fall in click-through rate, proof the strategy was working against the zero-click trend rather than being dragged down by it
•Average ranking position improved from around 27 to around 16, a gain of more than eleven positions
•Purchases from organic search up 37%, with organic sessions up year-on-year too
•Page-one keywords up 78%, including position one for catered ski chalets France and ski chalets Val Thorens, and a top-three position for ski chalets itself

Most tellingly, Ski Beat is now outranking far bigger, better-funded operators like Crystal Ski and Ski World across hundreds of terms, and earning high-authority backlinks, including that Forbes link, on content quality alone. Eighteen months in, the AI visibility foundation we've built means that position only gets stronger as search continues to evolve.

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