For brokers competing on ground that is bought rather than earned
The consumer terms are bought, not earned, and commercial broking is sitting untouched behind them.
A report on your own site, showing which searches you are contesting against a comparison site and which are available.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
4 minutes
He was able to take our rough ideas, from concept through to reality. The site has provided an influx of new members, helping to keep our club viable.
A passion-driven, good-hearted and reliable service provider with the competency of a genius when it comes to software engineering, AI technology and marketing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Insurance search is dominated by comparison sites and by the direct insurers who outspend everybody, which means a broker competing on the obvious terms is competing on the worst possible ground.
What is left is far better than it sounds, because the whole of commercial broking sits almost untouched behind those crowded consumer searches.
Car, home and travel insurance searches are owned by comparison sites and direct insurers with budgets no broker can match. Those terms produce the least valuable clients anyway, on the thinnest commissions.
The instinct to fight there is strong and it is wrong. A broker's actual advantage does not exist in a market where the customer's only question is price, and that is exactly the market those terms describe.
The advantage appears the moment the risk is complicated. A trade with unusual exposures, a business with a claims history, a professional needing indemnity, a project with a contract requirement nobody understands.
Those searches are smaller, less contested, and worth many times more per client, and they are searched by somebody who has already discovered that a comparison site cannot help them.
Public liability for electricians, professional indemnity for engineers, cover for a labour hire business, insurance for a cafe, transport, construction, allied health. Each is a specific search by somebody who has been asked for a certificate.
The trigger is almost always external: a contract requires cover, a licence renewal demands it, a client has asked for a certificate of currency. The person searching is not shopping, they are complying, and they need it quickly.
That makes speed and clarity worth more than price. A broker who explains exactly what that industry usually needs, what the common exclusions are, and how quickly a certificate can be issued wins somebody under deadline pressure.
Industry pages are also durable, because the requirements do not change often and the competition is thin. A broker with fifteen genuine industry pages occupies fifteen small searches almost nobody else has bothered with.
A broker's value is invisible until something goes wrong. At renewal a client compares premiums; at claim time they discover the difference. Every broker knows this and almost none of them has written it down.
A page explaining what actually happens when a claim is made, who does what, what a broker does that a direct insurer does not, and what commonly goes wrong is the single most persuasive page a broking website can carry.
Real examples, appropriately anonymised, do the work no claim of service quality can. A description of a claim that was initially declined and what was done about it is worth more than any amount of language about relationships.
It is also searched. People whose claim has been declined or delayed look for help, urgently, and they are frequently insured directly and discovering the limits of that for the first time.
Stop contesting the consumer terms, build a page per industry you genuinely write, explain the claims process properly, and be explicit about the compliance triggers that send people looking.
The industry pages are the engine. One per sector you actually understand, written with the real exclusions and the real requirements, because vague pages in this field are transparently vague to anybody who has been asked for a certificate.
The claims content is the conversion, and it is the answer to the only serious objection a broker faces, which is that the client could just buy it online for less.
Then the practical half: a listing, reviews from business clients, named brokers rather than an enquiries address, and a way to get a certificate quickly, because the person searching is usually already late for something.
A comparison site can quote a premium and can do nothing at all at claim time. That difference is the entire business, and it is missing from almost every broking website in the country.
Related reading from us: seo for medical clinics and seo for car dealerships.
Three to six months for the industry pages, which are the ones worth having. They stay ranked for a long time afterwards, because so few brokers write them properly.
No. Those terms are held by comparison sites and direct insurers with budgets no broker matches, and the clients they produce are the least valuable ones you can get.
An honest explanation of what happens at claim time. It is the profession's whole argument, it is searched by people whose claim has gone wrong, and almost nobody has written it.
Specific enough that somebody in that industry recognises their own situation, including the common exclusions. A vague industry page is transparently vague to anyone who has actually been asked for cover.