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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    How to Do Ecommerce SEO the Right Way

    Running SEO on an ecommerce website is not the same job as running it on a five-page service site. The scale changes everything. Product pages. Category pages. Filter-generated URLs that grow with every colour option, every size filter, every price slider. Manufacturer descriptions copied verbatim across dozens of similar products. All of these patterns quietly kill ecommerce organic performance. Most online stores are already generating duplicate content and thin page signals without realising it.

    Fixing that takes a different approach than standard on-page work. Each layer of ecommerce SEO compounds when done right. Neglect any single layer and organic traffic that should already be building instead stagnates.

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    How to Add Meta Keywords in WordPress

    A client emailed last month asking why his competitor outranked him. His theory: the other site must have better meta keywords. So he wanted me o stuff a long list of keywords into every page on his WordPress site and watch the rankings climb. I added the tag for him, because he asked. Then I showed him his own analytics, where that field had changed nothing for eleven years running. (more…)

    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.

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    What to Look for When Hiring In-House SEO

    The question comes up more than people expect. A business reaches a certain size. Organic leads start arriving. Someone in the room says maybe it is time to hire someone in-house. That instinct is worth examining. The execution is where things usually go sideways.

    In-house SEO can work well. It can also drain a salary budget for 18 months before anyone admits the fit was wrong for the role. Both outcomes happen in smaller businesses regularly. Which one you get depends mostly on what you look for during the hiring process. The questions you push on before extending an offer matter just as much.

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    Why SEO Is Important for Small Business

    SEO is important for a small business because many customers look for a product or service on Google before they pick up the phone, and appearing in those results, in the map listings or the ordinary links below them, gives a business the chance to be considered for the work. It also keeps working when the advertising budget pauses, because a page that ranks does not charge for each visit. For a business without a large ad budget or a well-known brand, search is often the most direct way for strangers with a need to find it.

    Why SEO Is Important for Small Business: organic search visibility for a small business

    That does not make SEO equally important for every business, and the reasons below are worth checking against your own situation before you commit time or money to it. The last sections cover when it matters less and where a small business should start.

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    Do Rich Snippets Help SEO?

    Schema markup goes onto a client page. Three weeks later, click-through rate is up 24%. Organic rank: unchanged. That sequence has repeated often enough at To-The-TOP! SEO Company to say something precise about what rich snippets actually do.

    Five gold stars. Review counts. Prices. FAQ answers. Cooking times. Event dates. These extra details appear in Google’s search results below the title and URL. That is what rich snippets show. They surface from structured data embedded in the page code. More information visible before the click. Different click behaviour as a result.

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    How to Improve SEO on WordPress: A Practical Guide

    WordPress runs a little over 40% of the web, and most of those sites are leaving rankings on the table. Not because the platform is weak. Because the defaults were never built for search. A fresh install indexes fine, loads reasonably, and then quietly fails at a dozen small things that decide whether Google sends you traffic. We see the same pattern on nearly every Calgary WordPress website we audit. Good content, decent design, and a technical foundation full of small holes.

    This guide walks through how to improve SEO on WordPress in the order that actually matters: audit first, fix the foundations, then push on content. The work is not complicated. It is just specific, and WordPress hides some of it in settings screens people never open. If you would rather hand the whole thing off, that is what we do at To-The-TOP!, our home base being Calgary SEO since 2007. But every step below is something a site owner can do without writing code.

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    What Is Outreach in SEO

    You email a stranger. You ask them to link to your page.

    That is outreach, underneath every name the industry has given it. Tactics differ. The request never does. Somebody who owes you nothing has to decide you are worth a mention.

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    How to Find Competitors Keywords

    Your competitors have already proven which keywords work. Every page ranking in their top twenty is a data point: that topic gets searched, that intent drives traffic, that search can convert. Finding competitors keywords is not about copying anyone. It is about shortcutting months of guesswork by looking at what has already been validated in your market.

    Most businesses approach website keyword analysis in a vacuum. They use suggestion tools, brainstorm topics, pick terms that sound right. Then they spend six months building content and wonder why nothing ranks. Checking what competitors already rank for takes maybe two hours and tells you more than a week of tool-based guessing.

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    What Is Mobile SEO?

    We had a client in 2019. Plumbing company, decent Calgary rankings, steady traffic. Their position-one slot for a main service term dropped to page two overnight. Nothing changed on their end. Google had moved to mobile-first indexing months earlier. Their desktop site looked fine. The mobile version was broken. Slow to load. Text too small to read. Buttons crammed together on a small screen.

    That is the problem mobile SEO exists to solve. Google does not rank your desktop site anymore. It ranks your mobile version. For everyone. Desktop users too.

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