The New York categories we turn down
Most agency pages open with what they can do. This one opens with what we can't, because in New York the gap between those two lists is wider than anywhere else we work, and every month somebody enquires from one of these categories.
If your business is in one of the following, a mid-size retainer is not a serious answer and we will say so on the first call:
- Personal injury and mass tort. The incumbents have fifteen-plus years of domain history, thousands of pages, in-house SEO teams and litigation budgets behind them. This is the most expensive keyword category in the world and the reason is that a single case pays for the year.
- Insurance. Same shape. National carriers and comparison sites hold every commercial query, and they buy the paid results underneath as well.
- Addiction treatment and behavioural health. Beyond the competition, this is a YMYL category where Google's quality expectations are strict and the referral market has a genuine history of bad actors. It needs a specialist who knows the compliance ground.
- Consumer lending, credit repair and payday. Regulated, heavily spammed, and the winners are publishers with review-site economics rather than lenders.
- Locksmiths, emergency dispatch and similar 24-hour trades. The map pack in these categories has a long-documented fake-listing problem in New York. Competing honestly against dishonest listings is a game of endurance, not of SEO skill.
- Interstate moving companies. Lead-broker economics, aggressive directories, and a market where your organic ranking competes with someone paying more for the same click.
Neighbourhood beats borough beats city
New York is five boroughs and several hundred named neighbourhoods, and New Yorkers navigate by the neighbourhood. Someone in Astoria does not consider a dentist in Bay Ridge to be in the same city, functionally, even though both are in the same city, literally. That's a forty-minute subway ride with a transfer.
So the query is "dentist astoria", "physical therapy park slope", "tax accountant flushing". These terms have modest volume individually and enormous volume collectively, and almost nobody builds for them properly because building for them means writing dozens of pages that are genuinely different from each other rather than one page with the name swapped.
Here's what each query shape actually returns, and what you can realistically do about it.
| Query shape | Who holds it | What you can realistically do |
|---|---|---|
| "dentist near me" | Map pack, decided largely by proximity to the searcher | Win your own catchment. Profile completeness, categories, hours, photos and a steady flow of real reviews. |
| "dentist astoria" | A mix of small local sites, directories and the map pack | Genuinely winnable. Needs one real page about practising in Astoria, not a template. |
| "best dentists in brooklyn" | Publishers and listicles — Time Out, local blogs, review aggregators | Stop fighting for the URL. Get included in theirs. That's digital PR, not on-page work. |
| "dentist new york city" | Aggregators, dental groups and national directories | Treat it as a byproduct of winning twenty neighbourhoods, never as the target. |
How many Google profiles a multi-site New York business should have
The rule is one profile per staffed location, and New York generates more edge cases against that rule than any city we work in.
A restaurant group with three rooms in three neighbourhoods gets three profiles, three landing pages, three phone numbers, three review streams. Straightforward. It gets harder from there.
- Suite numbers in a shared building. Legitimate if you're genuinely there during your stated hours. A midtown building with two hundred businesses is fine; a mailbox service inside it is not.
- Co-working memberships. Not a location, however much the membership costs. If the desk isn't yours and isn't staffed by you, run as a service-area business instead.
- Practitioners. Doctors, dentists, lawyers and therapists can hold an individual profile alongside the practice's profile — public-facing professionals are treated differently from staff. Used properly this is one of the few legitimate ways to hold more than one listing at one address.
- Departments. A hospital's emergency department and its cardiology clinic can be listed separately where they're genuinely distinct and separately reachable. Most businesses invent departments to game this. Google notices.
You're not competing with agencies, you're competing with publishers
This is the part that surprises founders. For any informational or "best of" query in New York, the ranking pages belong to Eater NY, Time Out New York, The Infatuation, New York Magazine's The Strategist and a long tail of well-staffed local publishers. They have editorial teams, decades of domain history and links from everywhere.
You will not out-publish them, and the strategy of trying — grinding out sixty blog posts a year to compete on "best brunch in the west village" — is how most New York content budgets die. The volume of content required to compete head-on with a US publisher is a newsroom, not a retainer.
The work that does pay is narrower and duller. Pages only you can write: your pricing, your process, your service area, your comparison against the alternative, your answers to the six questions every customer asks before booking. Those rank because nobody else can write them, and they convert because they're what the buyer wanted. Then digital PR to earn a mention in the publishers' lists rather than fighting them for the slot — the mechanics of that are in digital PR services.
What an INR retainer buys in a USD market
We invoice in rupees. Here's the conversion so you can hold it next to whatever you've been quoted in Manhattan, without either of us pretending the exchange rate is fixed.
| What you're buying | INR price | Roughly, in USD |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | ₹75,000 / mo · smaller sites from ₹40,000 | ≈ US$850 · from ≈ US$455 |
| Organic Social & Content | ₹30,000 / ₹50,000 / ₹70,000 per month | ≈ US$340 / 570 / 795 |
| Performance Marketing | ₹40,000 / ₹75,000 / ₹1,50,000 per month | ≈ US$455 / 850 / 1,705 |
| Organic Growth Engine (SEO + Social) | ₹99,000 / mo | ≈ US$1,125 |
| Own Everything Stack (all three) | ₹1,75,000 / mo | ≈ US$1,990 |
What the ninety days actually measure
The first fortnight is a technical crawl, a Search Console and analytics review, a neighbourhood-level keyword build, and a written baseline: your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search, frozen on day one.
Then that number is the contract. Beat it in ninety days or we keep working free until we do. We never promise a ranking position for a keyword — nobody controls Google's index, Google's own guidance warns against exactly that promise, and in a city where the map pack changes between Astoria and Long Island City a "position" isn't even a single number.
Two definitions we settle in writing before day one, because New York breaks both of them. First, what counts as qualified — form fills from bots and from lead-resellers are a real volume problem on US sites, and a baseline that counts them is a baseline you can beat dishonestly. Second, what counts as organic — if a meaningful share of your traffic arrives via a marketplace, a booking platform or an aggregator, we agree upfront how that's attributed. If we can't agree a clean number, we say so and don't take the work. We take three clients a month, which is the only reason a guarantee like this survives contact with reality. The argument for and against hiring offshore at all is laid out in Indian agency versus international agency.