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 Parasite SEO

    Somebody else’s domain does the ranking. Your content just rides along.

    That is parasite SEO, stripped of the language the pitch decks wrap around it. You publish a page on a site Google already trusts. It ranks because of the host. Not because of anything you built.

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    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.

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    What Are SEO Keywords? How They Drive Search Rankings

    Type something into Google. Whatever words you used are keywords. On the other side of that search, websites are competing to appear for exactly those words. The ones that rank did not land there by chance. Someone chose which keywords to target, built content around them, and let the ranking process play out over several months.

    SEO keywords are the specific words and phrases you deliberately optimize your pages to rank for. Choose the right ones and your website attracts visitors actively searching for what you offer. Pick the wrong ones and your content builds rankings for phrases nobody types. To-The-TOP! has been making these decisions for Calgary SEO clients since 2007, and keyword strategy still shapes results twelve months after the first choice is made.

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    How Many Times Should You Audit Your Site for SEO?

    The question comes up in almost every new client call: how often should you run an SEO audit on your site? Most SEO blog posts land on “quarterly” and move on. Still, that answer is not wrong exactly. It skips the variables that push audit frequency up or down for any specific business.

    To-The-TOP! has been the SEO company Calgary businesses have relied on since 2007, running Calgary SEO campaigns across industries, from low-competition local services to high-traffic product catalogues. Audit frequency varies by site, however. Getting it wrong in either direction has costs.

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    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 Much Does SEO Cost in Calgary?

    The question that comes up on every discovery call: just give me a rough range. Fair ask. Most websites quote SEO pricing in vague tiers and bury the number behind a contact form. Here is the straight answer.

    Pricing across the market where our Calgary SEO work competes ranges from $1,200 to $7,500 per month in 2026 for the majority of small and mid-size businesses. The lower end gets you a focused local campaign with one or two services optimized. Higher up, the budget runs aggressive multi-service rankings against entrenched competitors. Hourly consultants charge $100 to $250 in this market. Project work for an audit or one-off cleanup lands between $1,500 and $15,000 depending on site size.

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    What Is Global SEO?

    Global SEO means earning search traffic in more than one country. Usually in more than one language as well. The mechanics all have names. Domain structure. The hreflang tags. Fresh keyword research run again for every market. Translation, then everything that comes after translation. All of it real, and all of it covered properly elsewhere on this site.

    So none of it gets repeated here. This page is about the part of global SEO that no checklist has a line for. You cannot read the results page you are trying to win.

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    Is SEO Content Writing Worth It?

    Yes, for most businesses that plan to keep the site around past this quarter. Whether it stays worth it long term comes down to execution, not the concept itself. Content writing pays off under one condition. It has to target real search demand and get written to actually rank. Filler that exists just to grow a page count does not count. Skip that distinction and the spend turns into an expensive habit with nothing to show for it.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! treats content writing as its own line item, separate from technical work or link building. Clients ask about it constantly. Usually right after seeing a quote. The question underneath is rarely about writing quality. It is about whether words on a page actually move anything.

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    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.

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    SEO Keyword Selection: How to Choose the Right Keywords

    The most common mistake in keyword research is choosing keywords by volume alone. High-volume keywords look attractive in the data. They also tend to be the most competitive, the vaguest in user intent, and the slowest to move. Targeting them without understanding what ranks and why leads to months of effort on content that never reaches page one.

    Choosing the right keywords requires four assessments before any content gets written. Search intent. Traffic potential against ranking difficulty. Business relevance. Competitive landscape. Each one on its own is incomplete. All four together produce a shortlist worth building content around. Here is the process To-The-TOP! uses across every SEO campaign in Calgary and the other markets we operate in.

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