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

    Submit your request or question, and I will get back
    to you shortly

    Which CMS Is Best for SEO?

    Clients ask this regularly. Which publishing tool is best for organic rankings? Nineteen years as an SEO company Calgary trusts gives you a clear answer. The CMS is the floor, not the building. It enables or constrains. What actually ranks is the authority structure built on top of it.

    Still, the floor matters. A poor choice creates technical debt that compounds over months. Query-string URLs. Meta tags that require developer access to change. Load times dragged down by unnecessary scripts. None of that is fatal, but fixing it takes real time and real budget.

    (more…)

    What Is International SEO? A Calgary Specialist’s Honest Guide

    A Calgary manufacturer called me a few years back, frustrated. Their .com ranked beautifully. The catch: it ranked in Ohio, not Ontario, and certainly not in the German market they had just signed two distributors into. That is the gap international SEO exists to close. International SEO is the practice of structuring and optimizing a website so search engines show the right language and country version of your pages to the right people, wherever they happen to be searching from.

    I have been doing search engine optimization since 2007, mostly for businesses across Calgary, Alberta, and British Columbia. Plenty of those clients sell well past our borders. So this guide is written the way I would explain it across a boardroom table, not the way a textbook would. Honest about the work. Straight about the cost. Blunt about when you should not bother yet.

    (more…)

    Is GoDaddy SEO Worth It?

    For most businesses, no. Think of it as a tag manager with some local directory sync tacked on. No link building or content. Just metadata.

    Plans run $6.99 to $29.99 per month. That price ceiling also describes the ranking ceiling.

    (more…)

    How Is Ranking Different When Comparing PPC vs SEO?

    Two rankings. One word. They do not describe the same kind of thing.

    The standard answer is sound, so take it as read. An organic ranking gets earned over months, out of relevance and links and a page somebody wanted. A paid position gets settled in an auction, out of a bid and a quality judgment. All true, and covered properly elsewhere on this site. So is the point that an ad holds nothing between searches.

    (more…)

    Does Your Domain Name Affect SEO?

    Clients raise this one early in the process. Usually it comes up when someone is registering a brand-new domain and wondering whether to put their primary keywords in the URL, or when an existing business starts questioning whether a rebrand might improve their search visibility. The short answer: yes, your domain name affects SEO. That impact is smaller and more indirect than most people expect, though.

    Your domain name is a minor ranking factor. Content quality, backlinks, and technical performance are what move your site up in search results. We have been working as an SEO company Calgary businesses rely on since 2007, and the pattern holds consistently. A keyword-rich domain does not compensate for a weak site. Clean brand names on fast, well-structured websites outrank exact-match domains on neglected pages nearly every time. Understanding what your domain name actually does for your SEO saves a lot of second-guessing.

    (more…)

    How to Add a Focus Keyphrase in Yoast SEO Correctly

    The focus keyphrase field sits right below the Yoast SEO metabox on every WordPress post or page. Just one field, yet most of the plugin’s SEO analysis runs off it behind the scenes. Title checks feed from it. Meta description and content checks too.

    Type the target term into that field. Yoast checks the whole post against it instantly, across several different criteria at once.

    (more…)

    How to Add Keywords to Your Google Business Profile

    Most Calgary business owners know keywords matter for local search. Fewer understand exactly where those keywords go on your Google Business Profile and which placements actually drive your ranking in local search results. That gap shows up in profiles that look complete on paper but stay invisible in local search.

    To-The-TOP! is the Calgary SEO agency businesses have relied on since 2007. The GBP keyword questions come up in almost every client conversation. Most often it happens when someone has a fully claimed profile but no traffic from it.

    (more…)

    How to Do Link Baiting in SEO

    Link baiting means publishing something built to make other sites link to you. The tactics are well documented. A surprising statistic. One free tool built and given away. A strong opinion nobody else will say out loud. Original research nobody else bothered to run. That list is real, and other pages cover it well.

    So this page will not repeat it. The interesting question was never what bait to build. It is what a bait actually catches, because almost nobody names that part.

    (more…)

    Does Core Web Vitals Affect SEO and How Much It Actually Matters

    Yes. Core Web Vitals affects SEO. Officially confirmed as a ranking signal since 2021. Not the biggest factor, by far. Content and relevance still dominate. Still, a real, measurable one worth fixing regardless.

    Three specific metrics make up the group. Loading speed, interactivity, visual stability. A different part of the actual user experience on a page gets measured by each.

    (more…)

    GEO Marketing Explained (and Why It Means Two Different Things)

    “Geo marketing” search results split down the middle. Half point to location-based advertising, the older discipline of mapping customers by geography. The other half points to generative engine optimization, GEO, getting a business quoted inside an AI-written answer. Same three letters. Completely different work.

    This page sorts out both meanings first. Then it commits to the newer one for the rest of the article. That’s the version most Calgary business owners typing this phrase in 2026 actually need explained.

    (more…)