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 plane.

    How to Pick SEO or Social Marketing for Your Business

    Go where your customers already are. That is the standard advice, and every version asks about them. Where does your audience spend its evenings. What can you afford. How fast do you need it. Whether you sell to companies or to people. All reasonable questions. Not one of them decides anything.

    They decide nothing because they ask about your market. Yet your market is not the thing standing in your way. Two piles of raw material are, and both of them sit inside your own business.

    (more…)

    Are SEO AI Tools Free?

    Costs nothing. Never has. Google Search Console is the cleanest example of a genuinely free AI-adjacent SEO tool. Most software wearing the word “free,” though, runs a capped tier in disguise. Hit two projects. Or one real content push. The wall shows up fast either way. SEO Company To-The-TOP! hears this question from local business owners most weeks. Usually right after an afternoon lost comparing five pricing pages that each define “free” differently.

    A handful of options are free forever, with real utility behind them. Most AI SEO software gates the useful features behind a paid tier instead. The free version exists mainly to get a credit card on file, eventually. Both categories matter. Knowing which is which saves real money.

    (more…)

    Which SEO Tool Does SERP Weakness Analysis?

    Plenty of them. Most of the big keyword suites carry a difficulty score, and a difficulty score is SERP weakness analysis wearing a shorter name. Pick any of the well-known ones. They mostly agree with each other, because they are all reading the same page you are.

    The tool question is the dull part. More interesting is what it actually looks at, and the one thing it never sees.

    (more…)

    How to Conduct a Technical SEO Site Audit

    A technical SEO audit is a check of everything search engines use to access and rank your site. Not the keywords or the content strategy. The underlying machinery. Broken redirects. Pages Google cannot find. Speed that drops users before they read a sentence. That is what the audit surfaces.

    Run one without structure and you end up with five hundred issues. Six steps. High-impact findings first.

    (more…)

    How to Ensure an SEO Agency Aligns With Business Goals

    Rankings went up. Traffic went up. The owner still called asking why the phone stayed quiet.

    That gap is the whole problem. An SEO agency can hit every number on its own report and still miss what the business actually needed. Alignment is not automatic. It has to be built into the engagement from day one, then checked on a schedule, not assumed and forgotten.

    (more…)

    What Are SEO Reporting Tools and Which Ones Actually Earn Their Keep

    Ranking and traffic data get pulled into one place by SEO reporting tools. Technical data too, instead of five separate logins. Some are free. Others cost real money. Most fall somewhere in between depending on how much data a site actually needs tracked.

    The right tool depends entirely on scale. A single local business needs something very different from an agency managing forty client accounts.

    (more…)

    Why Isn’t My Google Ad Getting Impressions?

    The causes are well documented. A payment method that quietly stopped working. Then an ad sitting disapproved. One campaign paused in March and never switched back on. Budgets set to nothing. Locations narrowed until they cover almost nobody. Or a keyword hardly anyone types.

    All of it is real, and the diagnosis gets covered properly elsewhere on this site. So none of it gets repeated here.

    (more…)

    Is SEO Hard to Learn?

    SEO is not hard to learn at the introductory level. The fundamentals — what search engines look for, how keywords work, how to structure a page — can be understood in a few weeks of focused reading and practice. What takes much longer is building the practical experience to make SEO work on real websites under competitive conditions.

    The gap between learning SEO concepts and executing SEO successfully is where most people underestimate the timeline. Knowledge is the easy part. The harder part is applying that knowledge to a specific website, in a specific niche, against competitors who have been accumulating authority for years.

    (more…)

    Why Track Keyword Rank?

    Track your keyword rank for the usual reasons. Measure progress. Catch a drop before it costs you. Show the work to whoever signs the invoice. That list is real. It is also not the reason that counts.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! has watched people track rank since 2007. The number is the part everyone stares at. Yet it is the part that matters least.

    (more…)

    What Is the Best SEO Agency in Bend?

    No single best SEO agency exists for Bend, Oregon. Budget decides part of the answer. Industry decides another part. How much control an owner wants over strategy decides the rest. Anyone selling one universal winner in any market is selling a shortcut that does not exist.

    Bend sits on under 250 square miles of high desert and pine forest. Outdoor recreation drives the economy. So does a remote-work population that grew fast after 2020. That size caps how many qualified SEO shops actually operate inside city limits. Most owners searching this term end up looking regionally. Sometimes nationally, once the local shortlist runs dry.

    (more…)