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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    Do You Need a Website for SEO Marketing?

    Yes, mostly. Take the website away and you lose the ability to rank for competitive terms or build organic traffic over time. Some visibility is still possible. Ranking for anything worth ranking for is not.

    Where that line sits is still worth knowing.

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    Is Adding Too Many Keywords Bad for Google Ads?

    We see it in nearly every account we audit. Keyword lists that swelled to hundreds of terms. Sometimes thousands. Businesses assume more coverage means more traffic. The reality is usually the opposite.

    Too many keywords in a campaign can hurt performance. Not always. But the problems show up in predictable ways. Quality Score drops. CTR falls. Daily spend spreads across searches that never produce conversions. It is not about count alone. The real issue is whether those terms belong in the same ad group.

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    How to Add Google Ads Conversion Tracking to a Shopify Store

    Every order that comes through Shopify checkout gets tracked. On its own, Google Ads never sees that data. Someone has to build the bridge, or ad spend keeps getting judged on clicks instead of actual sales.

    Setting it up takes under an hour for most stores. Getting it accurate takes a bit more care.

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    How to Check If Your Google Ads Are Running

    The question comes up every few weeks at SEO Company To-The-TOP!, the team Calgary businesses call when their advertising goes quiet. A client calls after two months of running Google Ads and wants to know whether their ads are actually showing. They have spent money, they see no obvious results, and nobody walked them through where to look. Most of the time, something fixable is blocking them.

    Checking your ad status takes about two minutes. The confusion comes from not knowing which layer to trust. Google Ads has four levels where your ads can get stuck before a single impression gets recorded.

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    How to Increase Organic Keywords on Your Website

    We have seen sites stuck at 40 or 50 organic keywords for months at a stretch. No penalty. Nothing obviously flagged technically. Just stalled.

    The pattern behind most of those cases is the same. No structured plan for expanding the keyword footprint. The site published content sporadically, hoped it ranked, and moved on when it did not.

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    How to Search Google Keywords

    Two questions hide in that phrase. One: how to find keywords people are searching for on Google. Two: how to use keywords when searching in Google yourself. Both useful. This covers the first one. The second, finding a specific word on the page in front of you, is covered in how to search keywords on a web page.

    The goal: discover which phrases real people actually search, then build your SEO and advertising around those phrases. Every keyword tool, every platform, every free option leads to the same destination.

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    What Is Yoast SEO? | Calgary

    Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize the content on your site for search engines. It bolts onto the WordPress editor and gives you a set of tools for handling the technical bits most people never see: meta titles, meta descriptions, schema markup, XML sitemaps, and a readability check that nudges your writing into shape. Millions of sites run it. I have set it up on more client installs than I can count since founding SEO Company To-The-TOP! back in 2007.

    So this is the plain version of what the plugin is, what it does well, and where it quietly stops being useful. Not the sales pitch from the plugin page. The view from someone who has watched it help and watched people lean on it far too hard.

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    What Is an SEO Agency?

    An SEO agency is a company that gets your website found in organic search, the unpaid results below the ads. Strip away the jargon and that is the whole job. More of the right people land on your website from Google without you paying for each click. Some agencies are large teams with account managers and pods. Others are a single specialist who does the work and answers the phone. SEO Company To-The-TOP! has run as the second kind since 2007.

    This guide explains what an SEO agency actually does, how it differs from a freelancer or an in-house hire, what the engagement looks like month to month, and how to tell a good one from the kind that sells rankings it cannot deliver. No sales pitch. Just how the work runs and when it is worth paying for.

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    Can You Use Google Ads to Promote a YouTube Video?

    We get this one from clients fairly often. Business owners and content creators who have put real time into video and want reach faster than the platform’s organic algorithm delivers. Google Ads can do that.

    How it works. What it costs. Where it falls short for your channel.

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    How to Improve SEO

    The call I get most often is not from businesses starting SEO from scratch. It is from businesses that have been doing SEO for a year or two, have spent real money on it, and still do not see the results they expected. Usually the site is not broken. Rankings exist, some traffic comes in, some content is published. The problem is that nothing is compounding. Gains stall around page two or early page one for low-volume terms, and the high-value keywords keep sitting out of reach. As an SEO company in Calgary, we see this pattern constantly, and it repeats across Canada: a site that has done the basics but missed the details that actually move rankings.

    This guide covers what those details are. Not a beginner introduction to what SEO is and how it works, but a working checklist for existing sites: where to audit, what to fix first, and how to build authority steadily rather than in fits and starts. These sections follow the same order we work through when starting with a new SEO client.

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