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 CPA in SEO?

    CPA stands for cost per acquisition. Divide what a channel cost you by the number of customers it produced. That is the whole formula. It works the same way in SEO as it does anywhere else.

    The formula was never the hard part. Deciding which spend goes on top, and which month it belongs to, is where the number quietly stops meaning anything. This page is about that second problem.

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    Which SEO Influencers to Follow in 2026

    Ask that question in January and somebody hands you thirty names. Come back in June. A third of them have gone quiet. Another slice pivoted into AI consulting somewhere around spring. Nobody updated the list. It still circulates.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! has watched this ritual repeat every year since 2007. Names rotate. The ritual holds. What deserves attention is 2026, not the influencers.

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    How to Find High CPC Keywords

    Open a keyword tool. Nearly all carry a column with a dollar figure. Sort that column, largest first. That is the whole method, and it takes about a minute.

    So this page will not walk you through a tool. What a keyword costs before you spend is covered properly elsewhere. So is what pushes that cost up. Finding high CPC keywords is the easy part of the job. Everything worth saying starts once the sorting is done.

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    Do Product Tags Help SEO?

    Mostly they do not. That is the short answer, and it is not the interesting one.

    The standard reply runs like this. Tags spin up archive pages carrying almost nothing on them. Those pages look a great deal like your category pages. So Google reads near-duplicates. Nobody gains a rank anywhere. Noindex the thin ones, then move on.

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    How to Tell If Your SEO Company Is Working

    Most clients ask around month three. Rankings are up slightly. The phone is not ringing more. Panic sets in. So does second-guessing the retainer.

    No activity summaries. Not task lists. The data that shows whether your search engine optimization company is producing real movement for your business and your website is what actually answers the question. There are specific signals worth tracking, and most of them are free to access.

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    How to Create an SEO Budget That Drives Results

    The standard method fits in a paragraph. Take a share of revenue. Put some of it toward writing, some toward fixing what is broken, some toward earning links. Then watch what comes back and adjust.

    That method is sound. It is also written up properly elsewhere on this site. Rates too, along with what a Calgary month runs. So this page will not repeat any of it. Instead it goes after the number your budget sheet never asks you for. That number decides whether the rest of the row does anything.

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    How to Choose the Right SEO Company

    The call usually goes the same way. A business owner got burned by a previous SEO company, paid for six months with nothing to show for it, and now wants to understand what they missed before signing with anyone else. That is the right instinct.

    Before you buy SEO services in Calgary from any company or agency, knowing what separates a credible operation from a poor one changes the outcome of that first conversation. Choosing wrong is expensive in two directions: the monthly retainer that produces nothing, and the cleanup required if the agency used shortcuts that damaged the site’s standing with Google.

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    Is Directory Submission Good for SEO?

    Rarely, and only on a short list of directories. Directory submission once sat at the centre of every link building plan. Submit a site to five hundred directories. Watch the rankings climb. That era ended years ago. Most directories left today carry little to no ranking value, and a handful can actively hurt a site.

    Business owners still ask SEO Company To-The-TOP! about directory packages sold by other agencies. A thousand submissions for two hundred dollars. The pitch sounds efficient. Results almost never match the promise though, and the reasons why matter more than the tactic itself.

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    What Is SEO SEM Marketing

    The terminology gets mixed up more than any other pair in digital marketing. Ask ten practitioners what SEM means and six will say paid search. The other four will say SEM covers both paid and organic, with SEO as a component underneath. Both camps are right, depending on who taught them and which sources they read. The distinction matters less than understanding what each channel does and what it costs.

    For a service business targeting search in Calgary, the question is almost never “which one.” It is usually which one first, and how much budget to each. That answer depends on timeline and margin. Start there.

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    Does AMP Affect SEO?

    Not your rankings. That part closed in 2021.

    Google dropped the AMP requirement for its Top Stories carousel that year. The little lightning bolt disappeared from mobile results. Page experience signals took over instead. Any fast page could compete for the same slot after that, whatever framework built it.

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