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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    Can You Steal Competitors’ Traffic on Organic Keywords?

    That question comes up on almost every discovery call. Not always in those words. But the idea is the same. Someone ranks above you on the competitor keywords you want. Can you take that traffic?

    The quick answer is yes. Straight follow-up is that it takes sustained work and realistic timelines.

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    How to Add Negative Keywords in Google Ads

    To add negative keywords in Google Ads, open Campaigns, go to Audiences, keywords and content, choose Search keywords, and open the Negative search keywords tab. Click the plus button, pick the campaign or ad group, type one term per line, set the match type with symbols (plain text for broad, “quotation marks” for phrase, [square brackets] for exact), and click Save. That is the whole procedure for one campaign, and the rest of this guide covers the other places a negative can live, the symbols, and how to check that the block is doing what you meant.

    Illustration of the negative keywords tab in a Google Ads campaign

    The menu names in this guide match Google Ads Help as checked on 2026-10-31. Google moves things around often, and its own help pages sometimes call the same screen “Keywords” with a “Negative keywords” tab, so if a label looks different in your account, look for those words. If you want the background first, there is a separate guide to what negative keywords are and why they matter, and this page sticks to the doing.

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    How to Work With a Technical SEO Agency

    Access goes out before the kickoff call, not after. Search Console. Analytics. CMS login. Staging environment if one exists. Hand all four over in week one and the engagement starts moving immediately instead of stalling on an IT ticket.

    Most friction in these relationships has nothing to do with SEO skill. It traces back to unclear ownership. Nobody agreed on who reports to whom, or who touches the code once a fix gets flagged.

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    How Often Should I Update My Website for SEO

    No fixed schedule works for every page when deciding how often to update your website. High-traffic, high-value pages deserve quarterly updates. Everything else, once or twice a year suffices.

    Updating existing pages differs from publishing new content. This is about keeping what already exists genuinely current, not adding more.

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    How the Best SEO Agency Drives Ecommerce Sales

    The best SEO agency drives ecommerce sales by doing five kinds of work and then showing the result. It gets category pages ranking for the searches people make when they are ready to buy, keeps Google’s attention on those pages rather than on thousands of filtered duplicates, makes the product data accurate enough to appear in Google’s shopping results, builds guides and internal links that lead shoppers from research to those pages, and removes whatever stops a visitor from finishing the order. The evidence is in your analytics, where organic revenue should rise on the pages the agency worked on. Rankings and traffic matter only as far as they lead there, which is why a good agency reports on orders as well as positions.

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    Are Google Ads Worth It for a Small or Local Business?

    A business owner weighing whether Google Ads are worth it for a small or local business

    Are Google Ads worth it? For a small or local business they usually are when four things line up: enough people in your area search for what you sell, one new customer earns enough margin to pay for several clicks, conversion tracking shows which clicks turn into calls and sales, and the budget is large enough to collect real data within a month or two. When one of those is missing, the money tends to disappear without teaching you anything, and that is a common reason owners decide Google Ads do not work for them. This guide shows how to check each condition before you spend, and which Google settings decide the outcome for a small account.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! has worked on search marketing in Calgary since 2007 and is Google Ads certified, so the angle here is practical: what a Calgary plumber, clinic or consultant should look at before deciding. If you want the wider question of whether paid advertising pays across Google, Meta and Microsoft, that is a different calculation, and it is covered further down.

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    How to Choose a Web Design and SEO Company

    Pretty sites that nobody finds. That is the usual reason people go looking for how to choose a web design and seo company. Hiring a designer alone rarely covers it. The instinct is sound, too. A website built without search in mind starts its life buried. Still, the combined hire goes wrong more often than either service does on its own. One shop, two very different crafts. Few firms do both well.

    Sites arrive at SEO Company To-The-TOP! every year with the same story. Fresh build, five figures spent, no rankings anywhere. The fix costs more than doing it right the first time would have.

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    How Is SEO a Part of Marketing Automation in Practice

    Data drives marketing automation. Emails triggered by behavior. Lead scores updated automatically. Workflows branching based on what a visitor does. A huge share of that raw material comes from SEO.

    Organic traffic fills the top of the funnel automation actually works on. Automated workflows have nobody new to nurture without it.

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    Where Does 411 Locals Rank Among SEO Companies?

    411 Locals does not appear on the curated “best SEO company” lists Clutch or UpCity publish. It shows up in a different place entirely. Search results. Small business forums. Complaint boards. Mostly discussing the pitch process, not campaign results.

    That distinction matters more than a star rating would. A business owner searching this phrase usually wants one thing. Just a straight answer on whether 411 Locals is worth signing with. Here is what is actually knowable, plus how to check the rest yourself before any contract gets signed.

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    What Is an SEO Account Manager?

    An SEO account manager owns the client relationship. Not the rankings. They sit between you and whoever actually touches your website.

    Sounds like a small distinction. It quietly decides how you end up judging the entire engagement.

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