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 Create SEO Friendly URLs

    URLs. Google reads them before anything else on a page. Title tag comes later. Same with the H1. The address in the browser bar. Most sites underinvest there. Long URL slugs packed with stop words. Dynamic parameters with session IDs baked in. Date strings that lock otherwise evergreen content in a specific year. None of these problems are catastrophic alone. Together they signal to search engines that the site has not thought through how crawlers navigate.

    Six rules cover 90% of the URL structure issues that come up in audits. Apply them from the start and they never need fixing later.

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    How Much Does It Cost to Buy Keywords on Google?

    Two to four dollars a click for most keywords. Legal and insurance terms can run past fifty dollars a click, and sometimes well past it. That is the honest range for what it costs to buy keywords on google, though the phrase itself is a little misleading. Nobody hands Google a payment and walks away owning a word.

    What you actually pay for is a click. Pay-per-click, in the shorthand everyone uses. Your ad shows when someone searches your term, and the charge only lands when that person clicks through to your site. No click, no cost. So the real question buried inside how much does it cost to buy keywords is less about a sticker price and more about an auction you enter every single time someone types that query. Worth a step back first on what SEO keywords actually are, since the same terms you bid on are the ones you can also rank for free.

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    What Is the Keyword Opportunity Score?

    The Definition Takes Two Sentences

    The Definition Takes Two Sentences

    A keyword opportunity score is one number. A tool builds it from other numbers it already holds. Search volume goes in. So does some reading of how hard the results look. Often a guess at how many clicks the page hands out. Then a figure comes back. High means chase it. Low means leave it.

    Different SEO tools build it differently. Some publish their method. Others do not.

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    What Is Dwell Time in SEO?

    Dwell time measures how long a visitor stays on a page after clicking a search result, then returns to the results page. Ten seconds signals a poor match. Four minutes signals the opposite. Google has never confirmed it as a direct ranking input. The behaviour it captures still shapes how a page performs over time.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! gets asked about this metric constantly by Calgary business owners chasing every possible ranking signal. The real answer sits somewhere between “it matters” and “stop obsessing over it.” Both halves matter here.

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    What Is Google Indexing in SEO?

    We have worked with clients in Calgary since 2007. One question comes up on almost every first call. Why isn’t my page showing up on Google? Nine times out of ten, the answer is indexing. Not rankings. Keywords either. The answer is indexing.

    A page that is not indexed does not exist in Google’s search results. It can be well-written. Load quickly. Cover the right topics. None of that matters until Google has indexed it.

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    How to Optimize Content for AI Search Engines

    Search Console data from client accounts in 2025 tells a clearer story than any trend report. Impressions climbing on conversational queries. Click-through rates dropping on head terms. Branded searches arriving from AI-referred visitors who encountered a site weeks before they finally searched by name. The traffic pattern has changed.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been doing the local SEO Calgary businesses rely on since 2007. Nineteen years in. No shift moved faster than what happened between 2024 and 2025. Here is the practical account of what changed and why.

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    How Much Can You Make from Google Ads?

    Two questions share one phrase. Businesses running ads on Google want to know what return they will see. Website owners and app developers want to know what Google will pay to show those ads on their properties. Both use the same search. The answers, however, come from opposite ends of the same system.

    To-The-TOP! has operated as a Google Ads management company for Calgary clients since 2007. Outcomes vary widely. One roofing client spent $1,800 a month and booked $40,000 in work from it in a single quarter. Another client spent more and earned very little back. The difference was almost always keyword selection and the landing page.

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    Stopping Google Ads: How to Pause, Cancel, and Protect Your Data

    Two different questions get phrased as “how to stop Google Ads.” One comes from users who are tired of seeing ads in search results. The other comes from advertisers who want to pause or shut down the campaigns they are running. This post covers the advertiser side: how to stop Google Ads campaigns you are paying for, what pausing versus canceling actually means, and what happens to your account and data either way.

    For business owners managing campaigns without professional support, knowing where these controls live and what they do is the starting point. The platform is straightforward once its structure makes sense, but the terminology and campaign hierarchy can be confusing the first time through. If you would rather not wrestle with it yourself, you can have us manage your Google Ads instead.

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    How to Check Keyword Difficulty

    During our Calgary SEO work, a client once asked me why a keyword his competitor ranked for kept refusing to budge for his own site. Same phrase. Comparable effort, near enough. The answer was sitting in a number neither of us had bothered to read first. Keyword difficulty. It tells you, before you write a word, how hard it will be to crack the first page for a given term.

    So this is the practical version. How to check keyword difficulty, what the score actually means, and why the same number can be a green light for one site and a brick wall for another. I have been doing this since 2007, and I still run this check on every term before those keywords go anywhere near a content plan.

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    How to Do Keyword Research Using AI

    AI keyword research changed when the tools became genuinely usable. Not the underlying logic. The fundamentals stayed the same. How fast you can build a keyword list, and how much early discovery work you can hand off to a machine: that is what shifted.

    Here is how To-The-TOP! uses AI in this process today. Not a platform comparison. A working method, with the limitations included.

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