What Is Domain Authority? Moz’s Ranking Score Explained
Every new client at To-The-TOP! asks about it within the first few sessions. “What is my domain authority?” The number comes up, someone googled it, and now they want to know if 23 is good or bad. Honest answer: it depends entirely on your competitors, not on any universal chart.
Domain Authority is Moz’s proprietary score, running from 1 to 100, estimating how competitive a website is in search engine results. New sites start near 1. Well-established publications sit above 90. Most small and mid-sized businesses land somewhere between 20 and 50. The number is not a Google ranking factor. It is a benchmark tool, useful for sizing up the competition before committing budget to a keyword campaign. Those results pages have their own anatomy, and what a SERP in SEO is breaks it down. For SEO in Calgary, knowing your DA relative to local competitors is more useful than fixating on the raw number itself.
What to Look for When Hiring In-House SEO
The question comes up more than people expect. A business reaches a certain size. Organic leads start arriving. Someone in the room says maybe it is time to hire someone in-house. That instinct is worth examining. The execution is where things usually go sideways.
In-house SEO can work well. It can also drain a salary budget for 18 months before anyone admits the fit was wrong for the role. Both outcomes happen in smaller businesses regularly. Which one you get depends mostly on what you look for during the hiring process. The questions you push on before extending an offer matter just as much.
Why SEO Is Important for Small Business
Most small business owners contact us about SEO only after losing ground. A competitor starts ranking above them, phone calls slow down. Someone eventually pulls up the search results. That is almost always where the first conversation begins.
SEO Company To-The-TOP! runs organic search campaigns out of Calgary. Has since 2007. The work is the same whether the search says Calgary SEO or search engine optimization in Calgary. Same story across industries. Businesses with strong organic visibility grow more predictably. Those without it are either paying for ads constantly or waiting on referrals. Neither path scales the way organic rankings do.
Do Rich Snippets Help SEO?
Schema markup goes onto a client page. Three weeks later, click-through rate is up 24%. Organic rank: unchanged. That sequence has repeated often enough at To-The-TOP! SEO Company to say something precise about what rich snippets actually do.
Five gold stars. Review counts. Prices. FAQ answers. Cooking times. Event dates. These extra details appear in Google’s search results below the title and URL. That is what rich snippets show. They surface from structured data embedded in the page code. More information visible before the click. Different click behaviour as a result.
How to Improve SEO on WordPress: A Practical Guide
WordPress runs a little over 40% of the web, and most of those sites are leaving rankings on the table. Not because the platform is weak. Because the defaults were never built for search. A fresh install indexes fine, loads reasonably, and then quietly fails at a dozen small things that decide whether Google sends you traffic. We see the same pattern on nearly every Calgary WordPress website we audit. Good content, decent design, and a technical foundation full of small holes.
This guide walks through how to improve SEO on WordPress in the order that actually matters: audit first, fix the foundations, then push on content. The work is not complicated. It is just specific, and WordPress hides some of it in settings screens people never open. If you would rather hand the whole thing off, that is what we do at To-The-TOP!, our home base being Calgary SEO since 2007. But every step below is something a site owner can do without writing code.
How Can SEO and Social Media Work Together?
Clients ask this one regularly. Usually after noticing their Instagram following grow while their search rankings stay flat. More followers, same page-two position. The relationship between SEO and social media is not what most people expect. Both channels reinforce each other, though not through the mechanism most guides describe.
Google does not count likes or shares as ranking signals. That is settled. The real connection runs through reach, earned links, and the visibility your brand builds over time.
What Is Outreach in SEO
You email a stranger. You ask them to link to your page.
That is outreach, underneath every name the industry has given it. Tactics differ. The request never does. Somebody who owes you nothing has to decide you are worth a mention.
How to Find Competitors Keywords
Your competitors have already proven which keywords work. Every page ranking in their top twenty is a data point: that topic gets searched, that intent drives traffic, that search can convert. Finding competitors keywords is not about copying anyone. It is about shortcutting months of guesswork by looking at what has already been validated in your market.
Most businesses approach website keyword analysis in a vacuum. They use suggestion tools, brainstorm topics, pick terms that sound right. Then they spend six months building content and wonder why nothing ranks. Checking what competitors already rank for takes maybe two hours and tells you more than a week of tool-based guessing.
What Is Mobile SEO?
We had a client in 2019. Plumbing company, decent Calgary rankings, steady traffic. Their position-one slot for a main service term dropped to page two overnight. Nothing changed on their end. Google had moved to mobile-first indexing months earlier. Their desktop site looked fine. The mobile version was broken. Slow to load. Text too small to read. Buttons crammed together on a small screen.
That is the problem mobile SEO exists to solve. Google does not rank your desktop site anymore. It ranks your mobile version. For everyone. Desktop users too.
Does Video Help SEO?
Short answer: yes. The longer answer has conditions worth understanding before you start planning videos around the idea.
To-The-TOP! started getting this question regularly around 2018, when videos began appearing in Google search results as rich snippets more often. Clients doing walkthrough tours, product demos, or even simple talking-head introductions were showing up on page one twice: once as an organic text result and again as a video thumbnail in the SERP. That double visibility is real. It does not happen automatically, though.