Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
LINK and Bsale own the listing, but lose at vendor-acquisition
Business broking is a high-trust, high-stakes service that gets quoted on a website. The owner-operator with a $1.4m EBITDA-multiple-worth-it cafe types 'sell my business' or 'business broker [city]' or 'how much is my business worth' and the first page is dominated by LINK Business pitching their national franchise, by Bsale and Seek Business and Business For Sale monetising listings to half the brokers in the country, and by the SEO-optimised free-valuation tools that capture the lead and sell it on. The AIBB-certified Certified Business Broker (CBB) with the hospitality-sector specialty, the one who'd actually vet buyers properly (financial capacity confirmed, NDA before the IM, deposit-on-acceptance discipline), coordinate the virtual data room, manage the due-diligence period, and broker the earnout structure, sits on page two. So you spend the month on the leads from the same two accountants, and the cafe owner three streets away ends up listing with LINK on a 10% commission, gets shown to fifty time-wasters, signs an Heads of Agreement that falls over in due diligence, and ends up listing again twelve months later at $200k less.
Good business-broker marketing is three things, in this order: a sector-specialist service-page library that splits hospitality (cafe, restaurant, pub), trades (HVAC, electrical, plumbing), professional services (accounting, dental, allied health), manufacturing and franchise resale into their own pages, each ranking for its own search and speaking the language of that specific buyer pool (EBITDA-multiple bands by sector, typical earnout structures, buyer-financing constraints); a trust-signal layer that puts the AIBB Certified Business Broker (CBB) credential, settlements landed last year by value, anonymised case studies above the fold on every page (the credibility lift that beats LINK on the broker-intent search); and a Google Business profile that calls out the sectors you actually specialise in, the AIBB membership by year, and reviews from vendors and buyers about specific settlement outcomes.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Builds your annual plan around the sectors that actually settle for you (hospitality with average sale value $1.2m, trades with strong earnout structures, professional services with clean buyer-pool dynamics) rather than chasing every 'business for sale' query. Briefs the other agents so the service pages, the compliant Google Ads, the social cadence and the Google Business profile all reinforce the 'AIBB-certified sector specialist with real settlement evidence' positioning instead of competing with LINK on national-brand size alone.
Imports your existing site so you stop paying for hosting plus a CMS subscription, and makes spinning up a new sector-specialist page a five-minute job. Ships a clean service page for cafes and restaurants, trades, professional services, manufacturing and franchise resale, each with EBITDA-multiple bands published, the buyer-vetting process walked through, AIBB Certified Business Broker credential in the header and a 'book a free 30-minute valuation conversation' CTA, to your live site in two taps.
Goes through your live site for the things that actually move business-broker rankings: sector-and-city-specific H1s on every service page, ProfessionalService schema with broker specialty (not generic real-estate), AIBB membership in structured data, CBB credential in the schema, and a Google Business Profile that lists the sectors you specialise in and the settlements by year and average value. Auto-applies the low-risk fixes, flags anything touching commission percentages or settlement multiples.
Launches Google Ads on the queries that actually convert ('sell my cafe [city]', 'business broker [city]', 'business valuation [sector]', '[sector] business for sale broker', 'how much is my [sector] business worth') with a built-in AIBB code of conduct pre-check on every ad copy variant. Excludes the broad 'businesses for sale' queries that the listing portals win on cheaply. Switches Meta on for vendor education (where the considered six-to-twelve-month sale-decision audience lives), off for transactional listing searches.
Turns every settlement into a post in your real accounts: the buyer-vetting catch that saved the deal from a time-waster, the earnout structure that bridged the vendor's price expectations and the buyer's risk, the due-diligence finding that adjusted the multiple appropriately, the franchise resale that cleared in six weeks. Builds the 'real AIBB-certified broker who actually does the vetting and structuring work' trust signal that beats LINK on the vendor's second-look decision. You upload one settlement note, the agent drafts with the representative-engagement carve-out included and vendor/buyer details anonymised, you approve.
Drafts the long-form pieces that rank for the queries owner-operators Google before they list anywhere: 'how much is my cafe business worth in 2026', 'EBITDA multiple for an Australian trades business explained', 'how does a business broker actually vet a buyer', 'should I use a broker or list on Seek Business directly', 'how the earnout works on a $1m business sale'. Two drafts a month, in your voice, AIBB-clearable, that pull the considered vendor to your site months before they're ready to list.
Your first 30 days.
- Five sector-specialist pages (cafes and restaurants, trades, professional services, manufacturing, franchise resale) indexed and ranking on long-tail sector-and-city queries
- Annual plan weighted to the $500k-$5m owner-operator sectors that actually settle for you, delivered by Sam
- Google Business Profile rebuilt with AIBB Certified Business Broker credential, settlement count and sector specialty in the description
- EBITDA-multiple band guide published as the cornerstone trust asset against LINK and Bsale free-valuation tools
- Buyer-vetting process walked through on every service page (financial-capacity confirmation, NDA before IM, deposit-on-acceptance)
- AIBB-clearable settlement-walkthrough social cadence running, vendor and buyer details scrubbed
- ProfessionalService schema with broker specialty and CBB credential deployed sitewide
- Off-market and listed-sale enquiry forms wired into the website with vendor-financial-capacity questions baked in
Vendors do not list with LINK because LINK is better. They list because LINK was the first calm-looking result on a phone at 9pm and your sector-specialist page wasn't on page one. They don't know that the national listing brand will pass them to whoever's on duty that week and run a 'list it and see' campaign that attracts time-wasters until twelve months later when the business is back on the market at $200k less. The work is making sure that when an owner-operator types 'sell my [sector] business [city]' or 'business broker [city]', the first calm-looking result is your firm, with the AIBB credential visible, the sector-settlement evidence above the fold, and the buyer-vetting process explained instead of buried in a generic 'about us' page.
Agencies are too dear to actually run the sector-specialist service-page library and the AIBB-compliant ads for $3.5k a month. Tools are cheap but the AIBB code of conduct and vendor-confidentiality rules sit in the back of your head every time you draft, so you publish brochure copy that wins nothing. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the pages, launch the compliant ads, post the settlement wins, and keep your Google Business profile beating the listing portals. You stay in the driver's seat, two taps to approve, every draft pre-checked. Stop watching the cafe owner three streets away end up with LINK and a fifty-time-waster open-list campaign.