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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    Which TLD Is Best for SEO?

    The best TLD for SEO is the one nobody has to be talked into trusting. For a Canadian business that means .com or .ca.

    Google ranks none of them above another. That part has been settled for years. So the useful version of this question sits somewhere else entirely. Out where every other system between you and Google makes its own decision about your domain.

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    What Is an SEO Intern? The Job Is Access to a Live Account

    Somebody finishes six months of courses. They can explain crawl budget, canonical tags, entity salience. Then they apply for an SEO intern posting that pays close to nothing. Worth asking why that trade looks reasonable to them.

    Here is the plain definition. An SEO intern is a supervised trainee. Usually a student, sometimes a career changer. The role hands over limited access to live client accounts in exchange for low-level production work.

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    What Is the Google Sandbox in SEO?

    New sites don’t always rank the way you’d expect. Your site goes live. Good content, a few backlinks, decent on-page work. Then weeks pass with barely a movement in search results. In Calgary, we see this pattern regularly with clients who launched a new website and wondered why organic traffic wasn’t arriving. They’re not doing anything wrong. Something else is going on.

    The term for that experience is the Google Sandbox effect. It describes a period where new websites seem held back from competitive search results, even when the fundamentals look right. Google has never officially confirmed a sandbox exists. That debate has been running in the SEO community since at least 2004. Still, the pattern repeats across new sites so consistently that most practitioners treat it as established.

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    What Is Topical Authority in SEO?

    Topical authority is the trust a website earns by covering one subject thoroughly rather than in a single page. That is the definition. Nobody disputes it.

    How to build topical authority is settled as well. Group the subject into pages. Cover the questions people ask about it. Then link those pages to one another. All of that has its own pages on this site, so none of it gets repeated here. Neither does the payoff, which other pages cover too. New pages arriving faster. Existing pages holding their place.

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    How to Combine SEO and CRO for Faster Growth

    Two people look at the same page and reach opposite conclusions. One wants the quote form moved to the top. The other wants the nine hundred words that form currently sits under. Both can point at a number proving they are right.

    Neither of them is wrong. They are measuring different visitors.

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    Do Keywords in a Domain Name Help SEO? What John Mueller Actually Said

    Somebody in a forum told them the domain name was the problem. That is how this question usually shows up.

    The person asking has already collected two answers. One consultant said keywords in a domain name still help. Another said the whole idea died a decade ago. So they go hunting for a ruling from Google. John Mueller is the name attached to most of those rulings.

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    What Questions Do Managers in Construction Brands Ask About SEO?

    Sit through enough discovery calls with construction companies and the repetition gets hard to miss. A marketing manager at a general contractor asks something. Six weeks later a manager at a mechanical outfit asks it again. Almost the same words.

    So the questions are not the interesting part. They are good questions, and every industry asks them. What breaks is the standard answer, because construction does not win work the way that answer quietly assumes.

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    How to Set Up Conversion Tracking in Google Ads

    Conversion tracking in Google Ads connects your ad spend to the outcomes that matter: form fills, phone calls, purchases, page views. Without it, you know how much you are spending and how many clicks you are getting, but not whether those clicks are producing results. Setting up conversion tracking is the first configuration task for any new Google Ads account before running campaigns.

    The setup involves three parts: creating a conversion action in Google Ads to define what you are tracking, installing the Google tag on your website, and testing the tracking to confirm it records conversions correctly. Each part is done in a different location.

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    What Is Maximize Conversion Value in Google Ads?

    Two bid strategies sit beside each other in the same dropdown. One word apart. Maximize conversions, then maximize conversion value.

    Plenty of advertisers read that as a wording difference. It is not one.

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    What Makes an Outstanding PPC Partner?

    Nearly every trait that makes a PPC partner outstanding costs that partner money.

    That is the whole answer. It reads as cynical. Arithmetic is closer to what it actually is. Advice separating an outstanding PPC partner from a merely competent one almost always shrinks the account it lands in. Smaller budget. Fewer live campaigns. One channel switched off completely. Then the management invoice follows the account down.

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