Every few weeks a Sydney business owner asks us the same thing: the social media person wants hashtags on the website, “for SEO”. Should they go in? Here is the honest answer, what hashtags are actually good for in this city, and how to tell whether any of it is working.
What a hashtag means to Google and to Instagram
The same symbol does two different jobs: a filter inside a social app, and plain text on the open web.
Inside Instagram or TikTok, a hashtag is a filter. Tap it and the app shows every post carrying it, ordered by the app’s own engagement model. That is the whole mechanism, and it only works inside that app.
On a web page the hash symbol means nothing special to Google. The crawler stores “#seosydney” as a word, and an odd one, because people looking for Sydney SEO do not type a hash. The tag can only match queries nobody makes.
We have never seen a page move for a Sydney query because a tag was added to it or taken off it. The things that do move pages are covered further down.
A test you can run today: Google a hashtag you use, hash included. The results are social posts and explainer articles, not business websites. That is Google telling you where it thinks hashtags live.
Where hashtags pay off for Sydney businesses
Hashtags work where locals browse rather than search: feeds, Reels, Shorts and LinkedIn posts.
Sydney is a city of villages, and people follow their village. Someone in Balmain follows Balmain accounts, saves Balmain cafés and taps #balmain when they are bored on the ferry. A business that posts well under that tag meets them before they have anything to search for.
Three kinds of Sydney business get the most out of this:
- Venues and retail. Cafés, bars, florists and boutiques, where the photo is the product and the suburb tag is the catchment.
- Visible trades. Landscapers, renderers, pool builders and painters whose before-and-after work earns saves and shares.
- Practitioners with a personality. Physios, trainers, dentists and clinics that teach one small thing in a Reel.
Professional services firms get far less. A commercial lawyer near Martin Place is found by search and referral, and no tag set will change that. Their effort belongs on the website and in long-form LinkedIn posts.
How social attention turns into search demand
The link between hashtags and Google is indirect: people carry it across, not algorithms.
A strong post helps search in three roundabout ways. People who see your name on social later type it into Google, and that branded search is the easiest one any business can win.
Now and then a post is picked up by a local blog, a community page or a suburb newsletter, and the mention comes with a link. Links remain the hardest part of ranking in Sydney, so the odd one earned through social is worth having.
And a visitor who arrives from Instagram and reads two pages of your site is a lead you can measure, retarget and email, whatever Google decides to do.
| Sydney example | What the hashtags do | What the website does |
|---|---|---|
| Café in Newtown | #newtown, #innerwest and #sydneycoffee on photo posts | Google Business Profile with menu, hours and photos; a page that says “café in Newtown” in plain words |
| Landscaper in the Hills | #hillsdistrict and #sydneylandscaping on before-and-after Reels | Suburb service pages; reviews that name the suburb and the job |
| Physio in Chatswood | #chatswood and #northshore on short exercise clips | Condition pages; profile categories and a booking link |
Building a hashtag set for a local Sydney account
Fewer, more specific tags beat a block of thirty generic ones.
A workable set for a single-location Sydney business has three layers: the place, the trade or category, and one or two tags you own. Rotate within each layer so the posts do not all read the same.
| Layer | Examples | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Place | #surryhills, #innerwestsydney, #northernbeaches | Matches how Sydneysiders browse: village first, then region |
| Category | #sydneyphysio, #sydneyflorist, #sydneyrenovation | Catches people comparing options across the city |
| Own | #yourbusinessname, a campaign tag | Collects customers’ posts in one place you can reshare |
Skip #sydney on its own. It is too broad to surface a small account and too busy for a local to browse. Skip tags for other cities, and tags in languages your customers do not use.
On LinkedIn, two or three tags at most; the post does the work. On TikTok the caption and the spoken words matter more than the tags, because the app transcribes what you say.
Should a hashtag ever appear on your website?
Only when it is a campaign people are meant to use, and then as a link rather than decoration.
There are two honest uses. A campaign page can show the campaign tag so customers know what to post, with the tag linked to its Instagram page. And an embedded social feed can carry its own tags, because they belong to the post, not to your page.
Everything else is noise. Tags in a footer, a blog title or a meta description read as spam to a person and as nothing to Google. To rank for “physio Chatswood”, write that phrase in plain English where it counts: the title, the heading, the first paragraph and the Google Business Profile.
How to tell whether any of it is working
Measure the social side inside the app and the search side in Search Console and GA4, and keep the two reports apart.
- Instagram and TikTok insights: reach from tags versus reach from followers, per post, for a month.
- Search Console: branded queries, which should climb a month or two after a consistent posting routine begins.
- GA4: sessions and enquiries by source, so social traffic gets its own line instead of hiding inside “direct”.
- Google Business Profile: profile views and direction requests, which move when local attention is real.
If branded searches and profile views are flat after three months of posting, the posts are not reaching locals, whatever the tag reach says. Change the content before changing the tags.
Want the search side built properly? Our local SEO service handles the pages, the profile and the measurement, and an SEO audit shows what is holding the site back today.
