What Is Domain Authority? Moz’s Ranking Score Explained
Every new client at To-The-TOP! asks about it within the first few sessions. “What is my domain authority?” The number comes up, someone googled it, and now they want to know if 23 is good or bad. Honest answer: it depends entirely on your competitors, not on any universal chart.
Domain Authority is Moz’s proprietary score, running from 1 to 100, estimating how competitive a website is in search engine results. New sites start near 1. Well-established publications sit above 90. Most small and mid-sized businesses land somewhere between 20 and 50. The number is not a Google ranking factor. It is a benchmark tool, useful for sizing up the competition before committing budget to a keyword campaign. Those results pages have their own anatomy, and what a SERP in SEO is breaks it down. For SEO in Calgary, knowing your DA relative to local competitors is more useful than fixating on the raw number itself.
What Are LSI Keywords?
“LSI keywords” is the name many SEO tools and writers give to words and phrases related to the main topic of a page, such as “espresso”, “roast” and “grind” on a page about coffee. The label is borrowed from latent semantic indexing, an information-retrieval method patented in 1989, but Google does not treat it as a real thing: in July 2019 Google’s John Mueller wrote that “there’s no such thing as LSI keywords”. The useful idea behind the label is real, though, because a page that covers its subject in the vocabulary an expert would use is easier for Google and for readers to understand. This guide explains where the term came from, what Google actually documents, and how to find and use related terms without falling into keyword stuffing.
Where the term LSI comes from
Latent semantic indexing is a real technique with a paper trail. US patent 4,839,853, “Computer information retrieval using latent semantic structure”, was filed on 15 September 1988 by Bell Communications Research and granted on 13 June 1989; its inventors include Scott Deerwester and Susan Dumais, and the patent has long since expired. The abstract describes treating text “in the statistical domain by presuming that there is an underlying, latent semantic structure in the usage of words”. In practice that means the method looks at which words tend to appear together across a set of documents, so that a search can return a relevant document even when it does not contain the exact word the person typed.
How to Use Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is free. Runs inside Google Ads. Pulls data directly from Google’s own search index. A Google account is all it requires to access, though full search volume data means adding billing information at some point.
I have been using it with clients in Calgary and across Canada for years. Here is how the keyword planner tool actually works and what to watch out for.
What Is Technical SEO? How It Works and Why It Matters
Most SEO problems I diagnose trace back to technical issues the site owner has never noticed. A page that search engines cannot crawl cannot rank, regardless of how well the content is written or how many links point at it. Technical SEO is the work that makes your website readable and rankable by search engines: the infrastructure layer that crawlability, indexation, and performance all depend on, and that every other SEO effort runs on top of.
Calgary SEO work often begins with a technical pass before touching any content, because a crawl block or a page speed failure quietly cancels the gains from everything else. It is the reason good content sometimes ranks poorly, and why a proper audit always starts below the surface of your site. If this layer feels unfamiliar, how to learn SEO builds it up from the basics.
What Are SEO Keywords? How They Drive Search Rankings
SEO keywords are the words and phrases people type into a search engine, and the terms you choose to build a page around so that it can appear for those searches. When someone in Calgary types “furnace repair near me” or “what are SEO keywords”, that exact string is a keyword, and Google’s ranking systems then weigh many signals, from the words of the query to the relevance and usability of each page, to decide which results to show. Keywords drive rankings by connecting a person’s question to a page that covers it, which is why choosing them well comes before almost every other part of SEO.
That connection works in two directions. On the searcher’s side, a keyword carries an intent (what the person is trying to do) and a particular way of phrasing it. On the business side, a keyword is a decision about which searches a page should answer, and a poor choice can mean months of work ranking for phrases nobody uses. SEO Company To-The-TOP! is a Calgary SEO practice founded in 2007, and the sections below explain how keywords work, what Google itself says about them, and how to pick ones your site has a real chance with.
What Is SEO
Three letters. Everyone in marketing uses them. Fewer people can explain what they actually involve, why results take months, or why two businesses with identical budgets end up in completely different places. The longer answer follows. (more…)
How to Choose Keywords
Whether you have your keywords researched professionally or handle the job yourself, the most consequential decision is not which tool to use. Which phrases to target in the first place is what matters. How to choose keywords well separates sites that gain traffic from ones that stay invisible.
What Is a Sitemap in SEO?
A sitemap in SEO is a file that lists the pages on your website you want search engines to find, so Google and Bing can discover your URLs without having to stumble onto every page through links. It can also carry optional details, such as the date each page last changed in a meaningful way, its images and videos, and the other language versions of a page. Most sites use an XML sitemap, which sits at an address such as yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and is written for crawlers rather than people. Google’s own guidance is that a well-linked site of about 500 pages or fewer may not need one, but since WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace all create one automatically, the useful job for most business owners is checking that the file they already have is accurate.
This guide explains what the file looks like, how it differs from an HTML sitemap, when a site benefits from one, and how to find, submit and check it. It also clears up a few beliefs about sitemaps that were true a decade ago and are not any more.
What Are Citations in SEO? NAP Data and Local Rankings
Every citation audit we run starts the same way. Pull up the operation in a tracking tool, then check how the name, address, and phone number appear across the web. Most local operations have more citations than they expect. Many carry errors from a previous address, a number that changed two years ago, or a slightly different name format entered differently on three separate platforms.
A citation is an online mention of a company’s NAP data: name, address, and phone number. The mention can appear on a business directory, a review platform, a local news site, or a trade association page. No link back to the website is required. Data appearing together is what qualifies the entry as a citation for local SEO purposes.
Is SEO Worth It?
Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, with a timeline that most agencies won’t volunteer upfront. Organic search traffic compounds, but stop paying for ads and the clicks stop too. That gap is real, and the businesses that figure it out early are the ones ahead in search rankings a year from now while competitors are still renting visibility one click at a time.
What actually determines whether SEO is worth the investment for a specific company comes down to three things: how competitive the keyword landscape is, how much patience the owner has, and whether the strategy is built to compound or just to check a box. This post walks through all three, plus what real costs look like and when the return becomes impossible to argue with.