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

    Please prove you are human by selecting the flag.

    What’s the Best AI SEO Agency for Prompt-Optimized LLM Content?

    No AI SEO agency has proven it can reliably get a client cited inside an LLM answer on demand. That is the straight starting point. Anyone claiming a guaranteed citation rate in ChatGPT or Perplexity is selling a number nobody can actually verify yet.

    Prompt-optimized LLM content is a real discipline, though. It just does not have a settled leaderboard of agencies who do it best. What exists instead is a set of testable practices. There is also a way to check whether any agency claiming this skill actually applies them.

    (more…)

    Is SEO a Marketing Channel?

    Yes. Put it on the report, the budget, the org chart. Organic search is one of the ways customers arrive at a business, so it earns a line beside the others. Nobody is being sloppy.

    Where SEO sits inside digital marketing is settled elsewhere, as is whether it counts as performance marketing.

    (more…)

    Do I Have a Google Ads Account? How to Check

    We field this question more than you would expect. A business owner is ready to start advertising, and nobody can remember whether one was ever opened. Maybe a former marketing hire built it. Or an agency did, years back, and the login walked out the door when they left.

    Here is the reassuring part. Confirming whether you already have a Google Ads account takes about two minutes, and you do not need anyone’s permission to look.

    (more…)

    Does Website Traffic Affect SEO?

    No. Not the way the question hopes. The visitors you can send yourself change your rankings by nothing on their own. Those that might change something, you cannot send. That is the whole answer. The rest is why.

    You have read that traffic and rankings are correlated, never causal. True, and not the useful part. What matters is which way the arrow points, and a plain test settles it. Almost nobody runs the test on their own website.

    (more…)

    How to Find Keywords in Google Analytics (Plus What to Do With Them)

    Every few months, somewhere in our Calgary SEO work, a client asks why their Google Analytics shows organic visits but no keywords. Short answer: Google stopped sending that information in 2013. It moved somewhere else.

    The Queries platform is where actual search term information lives. GA4 connects to it and adds engagement context, making the combined view more useful. Here is how both platforms work together.

    (more…)

    When SEO Started and How It Evolved Into What It Is Today

    SEO started around 1997, roughly. Right after search engines got commercially useful enough to matter. Webmasters noticed something simple back then. Rank higher, get more visitors. The practice of deliberately shaping a page to rank better followed almost immediately.

    No single founding moment exists. A gradual response, more than anything, to how early search engines actually worked.

    (more…)

    Can You Use Competitor Brand Keywords in Google Ads?

    Clients ask this one often. Usually right after they notice a rival’s ad sitting above their own organic listing, wondering how it got there.

    Short answer: yes. Google allows targeting rival brand names as keywords. No policy violation. Suspension does not come into it.

    (more…)

    What Is an API in SEO and Why Tools Rely on Them Constantly

    Application programming interface. That’s what API stands for. Two separate pieces of software exchange data directly through it. No human clicking through a website manually required at all. Every major SEO tool relies on one somewhere behind the scenes.

    Ahrefs and Semrush do it. Dozens more platforms too, Google Search Console included. Automated workflows built on top of any of them draw from an exposed API.

    (more…)

    Is Shopify Bad for SEO?

    No.

    The list you came for is real, and it is short. Shopify puts /products/ and /collections/ into your addresses and will not take them out. It lets one product sit under several paths. Variants can spawn near-identical pages. Then there is the app pile, which slows a Shopify store down whenever nobody is watching it.

    (more…)

    What Is an SEO-Friendly Website?

    An SEO-friendly website is one a search engine can crawl and read without tripping over anything. That is the whole definition. Fast enough. Works on a phone. Clean addresses. Nothing blocking the crawler. Our audit and platform pages walk through every item on that list. So this page skips the checklist.

    Something odd sits in that list. Nobody points it out. Read it top to bottom. Every single line is a problem removed. Not one is a reason to visit.

    (more…)