I've had a lot of luck recently getting traffic to my business, by investing in several international domains. My .us domain ranks very well in Google.com, my .co.uk domain does great with Google.co.uk, etc. Most of these were easy to get as a USA business including .co.uk and .in domains which allow USA citizens/businesses to register for those domains.
The same can not be said for .com.au domains. Apparently there a lot of rules to getting one of these which include being an Australian business/citizen or being associated with an Australian business/citizen etc. It doesn't some to be as easy as going to some domain registrar, filling out a form and getting access to it.
Now I have heard about some companies that do "brand protection" and apparently they will purchase domains on your behalf, owned by them, in any country you like. I've seen several businesses without Australian offices get domains through services such as these. One example of a US business doing this is amazon's com.au domain which I tracked at AusRegistry.
Has anybody used a "domain protection" company like this before? The one that comes to mind is markmonitor dot com. Does anybody have any idea what this type of service cost? Are there any other options out there?
I was going to simply start up au.example.com to help rank better in Google.com.au but I assumed that getting an actual .com.au domain was a better investment as I've had luck with international tld domains lately.
Thanks.
