How to Find Freelance SEO Experts
Referrals first. Then the marketplaces, plus the communities where these people talk. Ask for live client sites rather than screenshots. Call a reference. Get terms on paper before money moves.
That is the answer, and a good one. This site covers it properly elsewhere, so none of it gets repeated here. What follows is the part nobody puts on the list.
What Is a Good SEO Visibility Score?
The question comes up after the first monthly report. A client sees the number sitting at 8% in SEMrush. Pause. “Is that good?”
The straight answer is that it depends. Not a satisfying response. Context matters more than the number itself. A score of 8% might mean strong early progress in a competitive market. The same score on a site running three years in a low-competition space is a problem worth addressing.
How Do You Do a Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis for PPC?
You pull your keyword list. Then you pull a competitor’s. Whatever sits in their column and not in yours is the keyword gap.
That is the whole method. Pick two or three rivals, export both sides, subtract one list from the other. Every step is written down elsewhere on this site, along with the question of which tools surface a competitor’s ads.
What Are the First SEO Steps for a New Startup?
The list is short, and everybody publishes the same one. Buy a domain. Make the site quick and reachable. Find the phrases your buyers type. Write pages that answer them. Then give somebody a reason to link to you.
Nothing on that list is wrong. It gets handled properly elsewhere, so none of it gets repeated here.
Do Google Business Profile Posts Help SEO?
Indirectly, yes. Not as a direct ranking factor though. That said, Google Business Profile posts still go by Google My Business to most owners, out of habit. They do not push a listing up the local pack on their own. The ranking signals sitting underneath shift instead.
SEO Company To-The-TOP! hears this question constantly from Calgary business owners. Someone posts twice, sees no ranking jump, gives up within a month. That reaction misreads what the feature is actually built to do.
How to Create Content for Local Landing Pages for SEO
A local landing page answers two questions. Where you work. What you did there.
Everything else on it is decoration. That is the whole method, so the rest of this article can explain why the second question is the hard one.
Do Subdomains Hurt SEO?
Clients ask about this several times a year. The setup is usually the same: someone moved their blog to blog.theirsite.com thinking it would be simpler to manage separately. Rankings stalled a few months later. Now they want to know why nothing is gaining traction.
Subdomains do not automatically hurt your website. The straight answer depends on what you put on the subdomain and how Google reads the relationship between it and your main domain. To-The-TOP! has been handling this question since 2007. The pattern is consistent: most businesses use subdomains for content that belongs in subdirectories, then wonder why rankings stall.
How Much Are My Competitors Spending on PPC? How to Estimate It
If you want to know how much your competitors are spending on PPC, the exact figure is out of reach: nobody outside a competitor’s Google Ads account can see it, because Google keeps budgets and billing private and no tool reads them. What you can build is a range: the clicks your competitor probably gets on the keywords they show for, multiplied by the cost per click Google’s Keyword Planner reports for those keywords in your area. Clicks times cost per click is the whole formula. If you already advertise, Auction insights then shows how often that competitor appears in the same auctions as you, which tells you how much pressure they put on your account, and the rest of this guide shows how to do both and what to do with the result.
Why the exact figure stays private
A Google Ads budget lives inside the advertiser’s own account, and Google does not publish it. The closest Google comes is the Ads Transparency Center, and its advertiser verification page lists what becomes public about a verified advertiser: name change history, ad creatives, the dates and locations ads served, ads removed or accounts suspended for legal or policy reasons, and organization contact information. Spend is not on that list.
How to Remove Duplicate Keywords in Google Ads
Duplicate keywords show up in almost every account that comes through our Google Ads management work at SEO Company To-The-TOP!. Nothing flags them from the main dashboard. No warning. Just two versions of the same keyword quietly splitting impressions between groups that should never have competed.
Happens gradually. An old campaign gets cloned. Someone builds a new ad group without checking what already exists. Twelve months later, two groups are bidding on the same term in the same match setting. Neither knows the other is there. Budget divides. Learning slows. Costs creep up.
Do SEO Marketing Plans Work?
A Calgary business owner asked this exact question two weeks into her contract with SEO Company To-The-TOP! She’d paid for SEO once before. Nothing moved. Six months, zero rankings, a cancelled invoice she still resents. Yes, SEO marketing plans work. That’s the short answer. The longer answer explains why hers didn’t, and what actually separates a plan that produces results from one that just produces invoices.
Most failed SEO marketing plans share the same root problem. Nobody built a plan at all. A vendor sold a package instead. It ran a handful of generic tasks and called that strategy.