Run the payback maths before you hire anyone
Sydney is the only Australian city where the SEO-versus-paid argument regularly settles itself on a spreadsheet rather than an opinion. Insurance, mortgage broking, personal injury and conveyancing are among the most expensive click categories anywhere on Google, and Australia sits at the expensive end of the global distribution for all four.
So don't take our word for the comparison. Take five numbers out of your own systems and do it yourself. It takes about twenty minutes and it's the most useful twenty minutes in the whole procurement process.
| Input | Where to find it | Sydney reality check |
|---|---|---|
| Average CPC on your top ten commercial terms | Google Ads → Keywords, last 90 days | Finance, credit, insurance and injury terms sit at the expensive end globally. Double-digit dollars is normal, not an outlier |
| Click-to-enquiry rate | Ads conversion column, cross-checked against CRM | 3–5% on a well-built landing page. Be suspicious of anything above 10% — it usually means you're counting the wrong event |
| Enquiry-to-client rate | CRM, trailing twelve months | The number most founders estimate and almost nobody measures |
| Average client value | Finance, not marketing | In broking and property it's front-loaded plus trail. Count both or you'll undervalue every channel |
| Months of runway | Your bank balance | SEO is a six-to-twelve-month instrument. If you have four months of cash, buy clicks and come back later. We'll still be here |
Financial services and broking: the compliance tax on content
Sydney is where the banks, the insurers, the funds and the brokers sit, and financial content there is not a writing problem. It's a review problem.
Mortgage brokers have operated under a Best Interests Duty since January 2021. ASIC's guidance on advertising financial products and credit sets expectations for how benefits, rates and comparisons are presented. Credit advertising that quotes an interest rate generally has to carry a comparison rate. Product issuers carry design and distribution obligations. None of that stops you ranking — but all of it slows you down.
The operational consequence is the bit agencies underprice: if every article needs a compliance sign-off, your content velocity is set by your reviewer's calendar, not your writer's. We've seen four-article months turn into one-article months for exactly this reason.
The fix is boring and it works. Build a pre-approved language library with your compliance officer — approved phrasings for rates, comparisons, disclaimers, licence numbers and general-advice warnings — and write inside it. Approval then takes an hour instead of three weeks. If your agency has never asked to meet your compliance officer, they haven't done this before.
Property, strata and suburb-level intent
Sydney property search barely uses the word Sydney. It uses suburbs and it uses regions — Inner West, Eastern Suburbs, Northern Beaches, the Hills District, the Shire, Lower North Shore — and it uses them the way locals do, which is not always the way the ABS does.
Strata is the other Sydney-shaped thing. Strata title was invented in New South Wales in 1961 and the state runs on it, which creates a whole search category that barely exists in most of the world: strata reports, strata managers, strata levies, defect inspections, by-law disputes. If you're a conveyancer, a buyer's agent, a building inspector or a strata manager, that's your entire long tail and it's far less contested than the head terms your competitors are bidding on.
New South Wales also has procedural detail worth writing about honestly, because buyers search it constantly: the five-business-day cooling-off period on residential contracts, vendor disclosure requirements, what a section 10.7 certificate is. Pages that answer those questions properly rank, get linked to, and pull in exactly the person who's about to need a conveyancer.
- Build suburb pages only where you can say something true and specific. Forty spun suburb pages is a thin-content problem, not a coverage strategy.
- Group by the regions locals actually search, then let individual suburbs sit beneath them.
- Strata and inspection queries convert harder than 'buyers agent Sydney' and cost a fraction of the effort to win.
- If you have physical offices, each one needs its own Google Business Profile and its own review flow. Reviews don't pool across locations.
B2B search around the CBD, Barangaroo and Macquarie Park
Sydney's B2B market clusters — the CBD and Barangaroo for finance and law, North Sydney and Macquarie Park for tech, pharma and telco, Parramatta as the genuine second CBD with government tenants attached. Founders selling into those clusters almost always brief us for the wrong keywords.
Here's the uncomfortable part: B2B buyers rarely type the city name. A procurement lead at a Barangaroo bank searching for a vendor types the problem, not the postcode. 'SOC 2 compliance software' has demand. 'SOC 2 compliance software Sydney' mostly does not. Chasing the geo-modified version of a B2B term is how a good budget produces a page nobody searches for.
So we scope Sydney B2B by problem and by stage instead of by geography, and we use the location signals where they belong — on the Google Business Profile, in the schema, on the contact page, and in the case studies that name Australian clients. The location work supports trust. The keyword work follows the problem.
Why we never promise you a position
In a market where a click costs AUD 30, the temptation to promise a number-one is enormous, and plenty of agencies give in to it. Nobody controls Google's index. Anyone guaranteeing a specific position for a specific keyword is either about to buy links using your domain as the collateral, or planning to quietly redefine the keyword at month three.
What we guarantee is different and, we'd argue, harder. On day one we freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search — the ones in your CRM, not the sessions in your analytics. If we haven't beaten that number in 90 days, we keep working free until we do. How we set that baseline is written up in full, because a guarantee whose measurement you can't audit isn't a guarantee.
Our SEO runs from ₹75,000 a month ex-GST, smaller sites from ₹40,000, month-to-month after the first quarter, and you keep every asset if you leave. Against Sydney retainer norms that converts to a fraction — run the exchange rate on the day, not on ours. The engagement itself is where the detail lives.
One honest exclusion: if you're a licensed financial services business that needs an agency able to sit in a room with your compliance committee every fortnight, hire in Sydney. We can write to your approved language library from India. We can't be at the Thursday meeting.