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

    Submit your request or question, and I will get back
    to you shortly

    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.

    (more…)

    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.

    (more…)

    Is Medium Good for SEO?

    Yes. Medium is very good at SEO. Just not necessarily at yours.

    That sounds like a dodge. It is not. The question is missing one word, and the missing word is whose.

    (more…)

    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.

    (more…)

    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.

    (more…)

    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.

    (more…)

    How Much Are My Competitors Spending on PPC?

    No public number exists for that. Google does not publish it. Your competitor is not emailing over their Google Ads invoice. What exists instead is a set of signals that get you close. Sometimes within a reasonable range. Never exact.

    Site owners asking this question usually want one figure. A dollar amount to react to. That number is not available anywhere, not through a free tool, not through a paid one either. What is available is a way to estimate PPC spend well enough to make a real decision.

    (more…)

    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.

    (more…)

    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.

    (more…)

    Does PPC Work for B2B?

    Yes, PPC works for B2B. Whether you can see it working is a different question, and a harder one.

    That gap between working and looking like it works is where most B2B advertisers quit. Not because the ads failed. The number on the dashboard was measuring the wrong end of the sale.

    (more…)