Greg Ichshenko

Calgary SEO expert and digital marketing specialist,
developing advertising strategies for businesses of all sizes

(403) 308-5949

greg@to-the-top.ca
1509 14 Ave SW, Calgary,
AB T3C 0W4

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    What Is the SEO Funnel (and Why the Three Stages Matter)

    Rankings alone rarely pay the bills. An SEO funnel matches content to where a searcher actually sits in a buying decision. A keyword’s search volume alone misses that entirely. Miss that match and traffic climbs while revenue stays flat.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! maps this out with Calgary clients constantly. A blog post ranking for a broad question pulls visitors nowhere near ready to hire anyone yet. That gap trips up a lot of otherwise solid content plans.

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    Do I Need an SEO Audit?

    A dentist in the northwest called last month wanting a diagnosis, not a fix. Six months of flat traffic. No obvious cause. Do I need an SEO audit? he asked. Or is something smaller going on here. The real answer depends on what is actually broken versus what just feels broken.

    Some sites need a real audit badly. Others are stalling for reasons an audit never touches, like a thin content gap or a market that is simply saturated already. Telling the two apart takes about fifteen minutes. Most of that happens before any invoice gets discussed.

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    How to Complete a Topical Map for SEO

    A topical map is a structured plan that documents which topics and subtopics your site will cover, which page covers each one, and how those pages connect to each other through internal links. The purpose is topical authority: the signal search engines use to identify which sites genuinely cover a subject in depth, versus sites that happened to publish a few pages about it.

    Completing your topical map is not a one-afternoon task. It requires researching the full scope of your subject, mapping everything to specific pages, and building the internal link structure that connects them. What you get when the work is done is a content strategy that compounds — each new page strengthens the existing ones, rather than competing with them.

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    Can SEO and GEO Strategies Work Together for Better Results?

    A client called last month with a question we had not heard much before 2024. They had ranked well in Google for years. Consistent traffic. Solid visibility. Then someone on their team noticed competitors showing up in ChatGPT answers. The strategy question shifted immediately. What is GEO, and does it mean starting over?

    The short answer is no. Worth working through before anyone shifts budget around it.

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    Does Word Count Matter for SEO?

    Word count is not a ranking factor. Longer pages do tend to do better on competitive queries. Only the length is a side effect of covering a subject properly, rather than the cause. Look at what already ranks, then write to that range. All of it is sound, and this site covers it properly elsewhere, so none of it gets repeated here.

    Something else about that number is stranger, and hardly anybody asks about it. Where did it come from?

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    How Do I Use Content Pruning to Improve My SEO?

    Content pruning means finding the pages that earn nothing, then taking them down. Delete some. Redirect the rest. Your website comes out lighter than it went in.

    That is the promise. Most SEO guides stop right there.

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    How Can I Write SEO-Friendly Content for Legal Blogs?

    The mechanics do not change for lawyers. Pick a phrase people actually type. Put it in the title. Give the post room to breathe. Link it back into the rest of the site. All of that holds for a legal blog, and this site explains each piece elsewhere.

    So none of it gets repeated below. One thing about legal writing behaves differently from every other industry. That one thing also decides whether the post ranks at all.

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    What Is SEO in New Orleans?

    SEO in New Orleans runs on the same machinery as SEO anywhere else. One assumption inside that machinery breaks here.

    Search engine optimization earns positions in Google for the words your buyers type. Universal so far. Then the local half arrives. It leans on how far the searcher stands from your door.

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    What Is Keyword Search Volume and Why It Shapes Which Keywords Are Worth Targeting

    Search volume counts how many times a keyword gets searched, usually per month. Ten searches. Or ten thousand. That number is demand, plain and simple.

    Demand is only half the story though. A high-volume term with weak relevance is dead weight. Low volume with a tight fit can out-earn it by a mile.

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    Why SEO Rates Are Down for a Company

    Your renewal quote came in lower this year. Same agency. Site unchanged. A smaller number at the bottom of the page. Most people read that as a win. Then they read it a second time and get uneasy. Both reactions make sense. A falling rate carries real information. It just never says what buyers assume it says.

    Here is the short version. SEO rates are down because the unit agencies chose to price stopped being scarce. The work itself did not get easier. Those are two different events. They land on the same invoice, which is exactly why they get confused.

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