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 Much Keyword Difficulty Is Good for SEO?

    Under 30. That’s the number most new sites should chase when hunting for a workable keyword difficulty score. Established sites with real backlink history can push past that, sometimes into the 50s. Score above 60 and a different fight starts, one against domains that have spent years building authority.

    Clients ask this question constantly at SEO Company To-The-TOP!. A keyword difficulty number by itself answers almost nothing. It only means something next to the actual site trying to rank. A five-year-old domain with two hundred referring links reads that number completely differently than a brand-new site launched last month.

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    What’s the Best Franchise SEO Agency for Multi-Location Businesses?

    No single agency wins that title for every chain. Site count changes the job. So does who actually controls the website, corporate or the local owner. Ten cities need something different than two hundred. A franchise SEO agency that handles a regional pizza chain well might drown managing a national fitness brand’s three hundred gyms.

    That answer frustrates people searching for a shortlist. A ranked top-five feels easier to act on. Reality doesn’t cooperate that neatly here.

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    Is SEO Marketing Paid Media?

    No. Paid media is space somebody sells you. An ad. Some sponsorship. A slot on a screen you do not own. Priced, invoiced, delivered. SEO is not on that list.

    Where SEO sits inside digital marketing is written out elsewhere, along with the paid, owned and earned filing system. Neither gets repeated. Nor does the argument about the money leaving your account, settled on another page of this site. Your money buys the work. It never bought the position.

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    Do You Need an SEO Plugin for WordPress?

    Most WordPress sites need one. Not because WordPress is broken. The platform leaves several ranking-relevant jobs undone by default. A plugin fills the gap faster than hand-coding each one.

    That said, a plugin is not automatic insurance. Setup quality decides more than the tool choice. A Yoast install configured badly does less for rankings than a bare WordPress site with clean permalinks and a fast host. The tool matters less than what gets typed into it.

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    SEO Copywriting for Humans

    No matter where or how you publish content, having a good copy online can help your website tremendously. The modern world focuses on communicating online for the most part. This is why online businesses are starting to see how SEO copywriting can help them grow their company and get to the top of their market.

    Search engine optimization (SEO) should always focus in part on copywriting if it is going to be successful. Good copy will catch the readers’ eye and be of interest to them. It will make them want to read and then act on what they read. That is why good copywriting involves using wording that persuades your audience to follow through with your desired action, such as buying your goods and services. (more…)

    IPv4 vs IPv6 in Canada: Why the Internet’s Quiet Overhaul Affects Your Business

    Discover how the shift from IPv4 to IPv6 is reshaping Canadian business, website performance, and search engine optimization. Learn practical strategies, real-world insights, and expert advice from Calgary SEO Company To-The-TOP! and Greg Ichshenko to future-proof your online presence.

    Let’s be honest – when someone starts talking about IPv4 and IPv6, your eyes might glaze over. Another tech jargon soup, you think. But here’s the thing: this isn’t just a nerdy debate about numbers. It’s about whether your website stays visible to customers in a world where the internet’s very foundation is changing. And in Canada? We’re right in the middle of this shift, whether we realize it or not.

    I’ll admit, I didn’t take it seriously either – until a client’s site suddenly dropped off Google’s first page last year. Turns out, their hosting provider had botched the IPv6 rollout, and their mobile load times tanked. That’s when it hit me: this protocol stuff isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between thriving online and becoming digital roadkill.

    IP Addresses: The Internet’s Postal System Is Running Out

    Think of IP addresses like postal codes for the internet. Every device – your phone, your smart thermostat, even that questionable Wi-Fi-enabled juicer – needs one to communicate. IPv4, the system we’ve used since the 1980s, has about 4.3 billion addresses. Sounds like a lot, right? But here’s the problem: we ran out. Years ago.

    How’d we manage? Workarounds. Lots of them. Network Address Translation (NAT) lets multiple devices share one IP-like cramming a family of five into a studio apartment. It works, but it’s messy. Connections get slower. Analytics get fuzzy (more on that later). And for businesses? It’s like trying to run a delivery service with half the addresses missing. (more…)

    What Is SaaS SEO?

    SaaS SEO is search engine optimization done for a company that sells software by subscription. That is the definition. It takes one line. Nobody needed a page for it.

    What gets filed under the name is a list of tactics. Comparison pages. Alternative pages. Documentation that quietly ranks. The technical business of getting a JavaScript app crawled at all. Every item on that list is real. All of it works. This site covers all of it properly elsewhere, so none of it gets repeated here.

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    What Is a Local Listing in SEO and Why It Matters

    An online record of a business. That’s a local listing, stripped down. Its name and address, published somewhere Google trusts, plus a working phone number.

    Google Business Profile. Yelp. Apple Maps. Dozens of other directories. Each one counts as a local listing.

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    What Is a PPC Report?

    Ask ten advertisers what a PPC report is and you get ten different documents. One runs forty pages. Another fits in an email. A third arrives as a spreadsheet nobody opens twice. All three get called the same thing.

    So the label tells you almost nothing. What the document contains, and what it refuses to contain, tells you everything.

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    What Is Keyword Mapping? An SEO Explains the Process

    A Calgary flooring client came to us in 2021 with nine blog posts chasing the same phrase. Hardwood installation. Every post nicely written. None of them ranking. Google kept swapping one URL for another in the search results, week after week, so no single page ever built momentum. That is the exact problem keyword mapping exists to solve.

    SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been mapping keywords for client sites since 2007. The process has changed less than people assume. Tools got better. The core decision stayed the same: one keyword group, one page, written down where everyone can see it. This guide covers what is keyword mapping, why it matters, and how we build a map in practice.

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