SEO Consultant.
Community Builder.
Speaker.
I help businesses — especially in financial services — build organic strategies that actually get implemented. And I speak at industry events on the parts of search that rarely get covered enough: the technical, the analytical, and what it actually takes to do this work inside a complex organisation.
- Allianz
- Canstar
- Savings.com.au
- InfoChoice
- Your Investment Property Mag
I'm Sally Mills.
I'm a Brisbane-based SEO Consultant working with brands across Australia. When I started I'd never heard of SEO only that a client needed to rank higher in Google. So, I printed out the Moz Beginner's Guide and read it front to back.
That was over a decade ago. I've been obsessed ever since.Most of that decade has been inside financial services. Allianz, Canstar, Savings.com.au, InfoChoice or building side-projects. The hard part of SEO in those businesses isn't usually the strategy. It's communicating the strategy to the team, getting it through compliance and into production. That's what I specialise in.
How I got here
Where it all began.
I didn't set out to work in SEO. I started my career at a digital agency called Icemedia while I was studying an IT degree — doing wireframes, content, QA, getting website projects out the door. I liked getting my hands dirty with code, so they eventually hired me full-time as a junior web developer. This was before AI could write anything for you, which meant building websites in Drupal and WordPress the old-fashioned way: Stack Overflow, documentation, and a lot of problem solving. My degree — IT with a multimedia design major — gave me Python, HTML, CSS, even Java. I wasn't a natural student, but the foundations stuck.
SEO came along by accident. A client called Good Life Health Clubs wanted search optimisation work done, and I had no idea what that was. I was curious enough to print out the Moz Beginner's Guide to SEO and read it front to back. Then read it again. I fell in love with it immediately — the mix of technical problem solving, data, and the fact that you could actually see the results of what you did. I've been obsessed with it ever since.
Learning to do it properly.
From there I was hired by Canstar, where I had the privilege of learning under an incredibly skilled SEO. The SEO industry has always had a noise problem: conflicting advice, bad tactics, and a lot of people selling certainty that doesn't exist. Learning under someone rigorous cut through all of that and gave me a real foundation in what actually works and why.
Canstar also put me in the room for a significant technical lesson: Angular was just arriving, and it was entirely client-side rendered — a serious problem for how Google reads and indexes content. Working through that gave me a deep understanding of server-side rendering that I've applied to every complex technical engagement since.
International scale and organisational complexity.
Allianz was a completely different scale of complexity. I was working on international projects — including the migration of Allianz International Health Insurance to Allianz Care, working directly with the Irish team. I ranked websites in Baidu. (That's Chinese SEO, very limited visibility into what's working, and for the record: I don't speak Chinese.) COVID arrived while I was inside a travel insurance business, which added its own particular challenges.
What Allianz gave me, more than anything, was an understanding of how large organisations actually work: how to get things prioritised, how to make a technical recommendation land across a business where everyone has competing priorities, and the importance of education — because no matter how good the strategy is, if you can't bring people along with it, it doesn't get built.
Five years. Four brands. At scale.
For the past five years I led SEO at InfoChoice Group, looking after Savings.com.au, InfoChoice, Your Investment Property Magazine, YourMortgage, and others. These were large, editorially active sites with significant technical debt and migration work at scale.
The migration I'm most proud of is Your Investment Property Magazine — a 30,000-page .NET/ASPX site moved to a headless dotCMS build — which increased traffic from the moment it went live. That result challenges the prevailing assumption that migrations always cost you traffic. They don't, if they're done properly. I also specced the headless CMS implementation from the SEO ground up: canonical tags, information architecture, handling of domain and path redirects with lambda, component design, how content managers could handle structured data without relying on developers for every change, making everything flexible enough to scale.
Content coming soon.
After five years at InfoChoice Group, I went out on my own. No grand plan. It felt like the right time to work directly with businesses rather than inside one.
Most of the work looks familiar. Financial services businesses that need senior SEO without a full-time hire. Companies mid-migration who need someone who has done it before and knows what breaks. Marketing teams who have the strategy but can't get it built.
Outside of client work, I've been building Brisbane's SEO community since 2018 — running SEO Beers monthly and co-hosting SEO Collective Queensland. Getting more Queensland SEOs on national stages is the part I'm most proud of.
On stage
Upcoming
Building the Brisbane SEO Community
Brisbane's SEO community didn't look the way it does now when I started working in search. I came back from Search Marketing Summit one year struck by how tight-knit the Melbourne scene was — how much was being shared, how connected everyone seemed — and wished we had the same thing in Brisbane.
I had a whinge about it to my manager at the time. She told me to stop complaining and just build it.
So I did. The first Brisbane SEO Beers ran in 2018 at Alpha Digital. The turnout surprised me. From there we kept going — moving to Soapbox Beers and running monthly events ever since, taking a break only for the months when we host SEO Collective instead.
In 2023, Peter Mead and Nik Ranger invited me to begin hosting SEO Collective in Queensland while we were both at Sydney SEO Conference. Since then, the events have grown to draw people from across the state — SEOs travelling from regional Queensland to attend.
For Event Organisers
Copy, paste, and use as needed. Get in touch if you need a different format or length.
Sally Mills is a Brisbane-based senior SEO consultant and speaker with over a decade of experience in technical and on-page SEO. She speaks on technical SEO, analytics, SEO automation, and doing organic search inside complex organisations. Sally founded Brisbane SEO Beers and co-hosts SEO Collective Queensland.
Sally Mills is a Brisbane-based senior SEO consultant specialising in technical and on-page SEO, with deep expertise in ASIC-regulated financial services. Over more than a decade, she has led SEO programmes across insurance, financial comparison, lending, and investment media — at businesses including Allianz, Canstar, Savings.com.au, and InfoChoice.
Sally's background in web development means she works directly with engineering teams and bridges the gap between SEO strategy and technical implementation. She speaks at industry events on technical SEO, on-page strategy, SEO automation, and the organisational dynamics that determine whether search recommendations actually get built — drawing on direct experience working inside compliance-heavy environments where the gap between a good strategy and a live page can be the hardest problem in the room.
Outside of client work, Sally founded Brisbane SEO Beers in 2018 and co-hosts SEO Collective Queensland, building the SEO community across the state.
Work with me. Or book me to speak.
I take on a small number of consulting clients at a time, and I speak at a small number of events each year. If you have a complex organic problem — or an event where this kind of work should be on the agenda — get in touch.
Get in touch