How to Do an SEO Audit: Step-by-Step Guide
An SEO audit is the diagnostic before any sensible optimization work begins. Skip it, and the campaign starts blind. Most clients who hire a Calgary SEO expert do not need quarterly audits, but every site benefits from a thorough one at least once a year, and always before signing with a new agency.
What follows is the actual process. The tools that matter, the checks that catch the most issues, and the order to run them in. Designed for someone running their own audit, but useful for anyone hiring out the work who wants to know what should land in the deliverable.
Is SEO a One-Time Thing?
The question comes up at least once a month. You read something about search engine optimization. Two or three companies gave you a quote. Now you want to know whether a single project is enough to get your website ranking.
Not usually. A one-time project is a starting point. It is not a strategy. Here is why that distinction matters for your business before you spend anything.
How to Use Keywords for SEO
Keywords. Every one a phrase someone typed. Get them right and Google routes traffic your way. Miss and the content sits invisible, ranking for nothing anyone actually searches.
This is the practical version.
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 for Small Business?
Worth the money, or just run ads instead? That is the real question in almost every first conversation. Not “how does SEO work.” That comes later.
Nineteen years of doing this. Here is the straight read.
How to Configure Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most widely used WordPress SEO plugin, with over five million active installations. It helps you configure technical SEO settings that affect how search engines crawl and index your site, and provides on-page guidance for each post and page as you write your content. Configuring Yoast SEO correctly takes about thirty minutes to an hour for a new WordPress site and covers settings that would otherwise require manual code edits or separate plugins.
This guide covers the essential Yoast SEO configuration steps in the order you should complete them, from initial setup through on-page content optimisation. Some settings are one-time configurations. Others — like the on-page analysis for your content — apply to every piece you publish.
What Keywords Do I Rank For? How to Find Your Google Rankings
Most site owners have no idea what their site actually ranks for. They know which keywords they targeted. What Google ended up indexing them for is often a completely different list. The two rarely match. Queries you never optimised for can drive more traffic than the ones you spent months building. Meanwhile, pages you thought were locked up appear nowhere in Google’s results.
Finding out what keywords your site ranks for is one of the first moves in any website keyword analysis. The data lives in a few tools. Google Search Console is free and reports directly from Google’s own index. Third-party platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush add competitive context. Together they give a complete picture of where your site stands, which pages are driving organic traffic, and where keyword opportunities are sitting untouched.
What Is Google Ads and How Does It Work
Most businesses that call To-The-TOP! about Google Ads have already tried it. Budget went in, the dashboard showed activity, and the revenue picture did not change much. The question is never about what Google Ads is. More often, it is why the campaigns produced clicks without conversions.
The answer is almost always the same. Clicks are easy to buy. Converting those clicks is not. (more…)
How to Set Up Retargeting Ads on Google
Most visitors leave your site without doing anything. The number runs between 92 and 98 percent on the first visit across most industries. Retargeting, Google’s internal term for it is remarketing, is how you put your brand back in front of those people after they leave.
Conversion rarely happens in one visit. Someone comparing service providers this afternoon is still comparing tonight. Remarketing keeps your ads in front of them during that window.
How to Scale an SEO Agency
Ten clients feels manageable. Fifty clients on the same reporting spreadsheet does not. Most SEO agency owners hit that wall somewhere between year two and year four, right when growth should feel like a win.
Process first. Then people. Client selection comes last. That is the order scaling an SEO agency actually breaks in. Skip ahead and revenue grows while the actual work quietly gets worse.