With a website that Google Ranks – and her visitors love – her search visibility is high and she gets in front of the right people who want to actually buy her services. Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it?
It’s an unfortunate reality that a lot of SEO providers will take your money and start “doing SEO” without ever properly understanding your business, your customers or what’s actually holding your website back. That’s not how I work. At all.
Here’s my process from start to finish, and why each step matters:
Before I touch a single page on your website, I need to understand what your business actually does, who your ideal customer is and, most importantly, why that customer should hire you instead of your competitors.
What problem are you solving? Who has that problem? What would make someone searching for your services choose you over the person ranking above you right now?
This is the type of information that will drive everything that comes after it.
Your website needs to sound like a trustworthy, knowledgeable version of you and not a corporate brochure with a desperate sales pitch, and I’ll work with you to develop the right tone for your specific audience.
A roofing company and a pilates studio need to communicate very differently, even if they’re both trying to convert the same type of searcher – someone with a problem, looking for the right person to solve it.
Getting this right from the start means every page we build is pulling in the same direction.
My next step is to I take a look at where you currently stand online, which involves examining your existing website, your Google Business Profile, your backlink profile and — critically — your Google Search Console data.
GSC is one of the most underutilised tools in SEO, because It tells us exactly what queries your site is already getting impressions for, which pages are almost ranking but not quite converting clicks, where crawl issues are suppressing your visibility and what Google itself thinks about your site’s performance.
It’s unfortunate, but a lot of the SEO folks rely entirely on third-party tools and never look at what Google is actually telling them directly.
I always start here.
Once I understand where you are, I look at where your competitors are, and, more importantly, why they’re there.
Which pages are ranking and for what terms?
What content are they producing that Google is rewarding?
Where are the gaps they haven’t covered that you can own?
How much authority are you realistically competing against and what does that mean for your timeline?
This step turns your SEO strategy from a generic checklist into something built specifically for your market, your competitors and your situation.
Before getting into longer-term strategy, I try to look for immediate opportunities — things we can fix or optimise right now that could start generating results quickly.
These typically include pages that are already ranking on page 2 or 3 for valuable terms and just need a push, Google Business Profile gaps that are suppressing your local visibility, pages targeting the wrong intent that can be quickly reframed, and title tags or meta descriptions that are killing your click-through rate despite decent rankings.
And if we can get your phone ringing in the first few weeks through a few smart tweaks, that’s always the priority.
Note: This assumes you already have some form of online presence, existing rankings and an active Google Search Console account. If you’re starting completely from scratch, the timeline and approach will be different (and we’ll discuss that upfront).
There’s no point building a content strategy on a site that Google is struggling to crawl.
Before we go deeper, I assess the technical health of your website for things like page speed, mobile responsiveness, crawlability, indexation, canonical issues and internal linking structure.
If the foundation is solid, we build on it. If it isn’t, we fix it first, because advanced SEO work on a technically broken site is like renovating a house with a cracked foundation.
It looks better temporarily but the problems underneath don’t go away.
This is also where the connection between good web design and effective SEO becomes most obvious.
A properly built website isn’t just easier for visitors to use, it’s easier for Google to understand, crawl and rank.
This is where the longer-term, compounding work begins.
It’s important for you as a business owner to understand that modern SEO isn’t about optimising individual pages for individual keywords anymore.
It’s about building a content ecosystem that tells Google, along with the various AI systems, that your business is the authoritative, trusted source for your topic area.
In a nutshell, that’s what “Topical Authority” is and it’s how Google is now separating the sites that will rank and the sites that will not.
And to do this effectively means developing hub pages and supporting content that cover your services comprehensively, creating semantic relationships between pages through strategic internal linking, building entity signals that reinforce what your business is and who it serves, and expanding your content footprint to cover the full range of queries your ideal clients are actually searching for.
This is the work that takes time to set up properly, but, once it’s in place, it compounds.
Rankings built this way tend to stick, grow and resist algorithm updates rather than fluctuating with every change Google makes.
And this is precisely why you shouldn’t be building your website ahead of your SEO blueprint.
The architecture, the content structure, the internal linking – all of it needs to be designed with this strategy in mind from day one.
01
Google evaluates your entire website to determine whether you’re a genuinely authoritative source. One well-optimised page is rarely enough anymore.
02
Google’s understanding of the web is built around entities and their relationships, and not just keyword matches. Being known matters as much as being found.
03
Modern search engines understand meaning, not just words. Your content needs to be written for human understanding first instead of just keyword repetition.
04
Google considers a whole range of related searches when evaluating your page that covers the full constellation of what your clients are searching for.
05
Salience is how prominently and meaningfully a topic features in your content. Google evaluates not just whether a concept appears — but how central it is.
06
Strategic internal linking tells Google which pages matter most and how authority flows through your site. One of the most underutilised signals in SEO.
07
Structured data helps Google understand exactly what your content means — not just what it says. One of the most overlooked advantages for small businesses.
08
Getting included in Google’s AI summaries isn’t about optimising for AI specifically. Doing modern SEO properly means AI overview visibility follows naturally.
While backlinks* remain one of Google’s most important ranking signals. what’s changed is how Google evaluates them.
These days, a thousand low-quality links from irrelevant websites does next to nothing and what actually moves the needle is a smaller number of genuinely authoritative, topically-relevant links.
"The links you need are directly tied to how competitive your niche is and how much authority your site currently carries".
This is where PageRank still lives, not as the visible metric it once was, but as the underlying principle that authority flows through links.
When a high-authority, relevant website links to yours, it passes a measure of that authority along with it.
*Backlinks are instances when another website mentions you or your services and creates a link back to a page on your website.
A local bookkeeper in a mid-sized Ontario city might rank well with minimal backlink work, but a Toronto contractor or landscaping company is operating in an entirely different environment.
These are among the most aggressively-competitive local niches in the GTA, with established competitors who have been accumulating authoritative backlinks for years.
The goal is never acquiring links for the sake of links.
It’s building the kind of off-page authority profile that tells Google your business belongs at the top of a competitive result.
And, on that note…
If you’ve ever been tempted by a Fiverr or Legiit package promising hundreds of backlinks for next to nothing, or considered responding to one of those unsolicited (spam) emails from a “link building specialist” offering guaranteed placements on high-DA sites, here’s the reality.
Google has become exceptionally good at identifying and simply ignoring unnatural link patterns. Mass-purchased links from link farms, private blog networks and offshore resellers don’t carry the authority their sellers claim, and Google typically discounts them entirely.
You won’t necessarily be penalised, unless the violation is egregious enough, of course, but you won’t benefit either.
The real cost of cheap backlinks isn’t what you paid for the package, It’s the time and money wasted on something that moved the needle exactly nowhere, while your competitors were quietly building the kind of genuine authority that actually compounds over time.
Good backlinks are earned or carefully acquired from genuinely relevant, authoritative sources, and it takes more time and costs more to acquire them.
Ranking well in Toronto isn’t just about knowing SEO. It’s about knowing Toronto.
I was born here, grew up here and have spent more than two decades working with small businesses across the city and the broader GTA.
And that’s not just some line I’ve come up with: It’s the difference between a generic strategy built around a city name and one built around genuine, street-level knowledge of how this market actually works.
Toronto is one of the most competitive local search markets in Canada, so, whatever your service is, there are likely dozens of competitors within a few kilometres of your ideal client — with most of them saying virtually the same things on virtually the same kinds of websites.
In a market this dense, vague positioning is a virtual death sentence, as trying to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to almost no one. Always remember – the person searching has a problem they need solved and you need to (quickly) show them that you’re the one to solve it for them.
The businesses that win local search in Toronto are the ones that have made it unmistakably clear what they do exceptionally well, who they do it for and why a potential client in their area should choose them over the three similar businesses ranking nearby.
This is why every local SEO project I take on starts with brand and positioning work before a single page gets optimised.
And getting that foundation right is what makes everything else work.
Effective local SEO in Toronto isn’t just about mentioning neighbourhood names, it’s about understanding which areas represent genuine conversion opportunities for your specific service, and, perhaps even more importantly, which ones don’t.
Different neighbourhoods have different demographic profiles, different foot traffic patterns and different concentrations of your ideal client.
As an example, a home renovation company targeting young families gets very different results focusing on up-and-coming east-end neighbourhoods than it would targeting areas with predominantly older, longer-established residents – even if both areas are geographically close.
Targeting everywhere equally isn’t a strategy – It’s a waste of budget.
I know where your best potential clients are most likely to be searching, what they’re most likely to be searching for and how to position your business to be the answer to their problem when they do.
The two most common local SEO failures I see repeatedly across Toronto small businesses are ones that are entirely fixable, but only if you know what you’re looking at.
The first is an underdeveloped Google Business Profile.
Most businesses set it up once, never touch it again and wonder why competitors with half their experience are showing up above them in the local pack.
A properly optimised, actively maintained GBP listing is one of the fastest levers available for improving local visibility and one of the most consistently neglected, unfortunately.
The second is a failure to hyper-focus on their niche.
In a market with no shortage of competitors claiming to offer the same services, the businesses that stand out are the ones that have clearly defined what they’re best at and who they’re best at it for.
Being vague and trying to appeal to everyone at the same time may work in smaller markets.
In Toronto, it just makes you invisible.
When you work with me, you’re working with someone who answers their own phone, responds to their own emails and is available during normal Toronto business hours, because this is where I live and work.
No ticket systems. No junior account managers. No emails arriving at 3am from someone who has never seen a Toronto winter, let alone navigated the difference between targeting The Beaches versus Birchcliff.
Just direct, clear communication with someone who knows this city, knows this market and is genuinely invested in your results.
I serve clients across Toronto and the GTA and I’ve been doing so for more than 25 years *.
And all of that experience serves as a reflection of where I have real market knowledge and real client experience.
* Writing this made me sit back and reflect on that time frame – time really does fly, doesn’t it?
I’ve worked with – and successfully helped – many small, service-based businesses with their websites, SEO, overall messaging and everything else related to their online presence.
But don’t just take my word for it:
View some of my client projects and see for yourself.
The short answer, unfortunately, is “it depends on the project”.
This is a bit of a loaded question and I go into it in more detail on my SEO Services page.
My personal monthly minimum is $1,000.00, so you would need to at least have that much of a budget to get started.
The short answer, unfortunately, is “it depends on the project”.
This is a bit of a loaded question and I go into it in more detail on my SEO Services page.
But I will say that my goal is to get you the required rankings you need to start seeing some ROI.
Once we achieve that much, continuing to strengthen your visibility will depend on your competitors and your budget.
Without knowing the specifics about your particular project, this is another tough one to answer accurately.
I can tell you, though, that my pricing starts at $1,000.00 for a one-page website and goes up to $5,000.00+ for a multi-service website.
But keep in mind that these aren’t just “websites”; They’re client-focused websites with the proper structure, visuals, messaging and built-in SEO that will speak directly to your ideal clients and entice them to contact you.
All of my website packages include strong on-page SEO, including fully-implemented “Local Business” Schema, Google Analytics integration and more.
There are a few things to consider when you’re thinking about Google Ads – or any type of PPC campaign, for that matter.
Firstly, there is the cost of the actual ads, in terms of clicks and how many impressions you’re willing to pay for.
Then there’s the creation of properly optimized landing pages.
And, lastly, is our flat monthly fee.
Check out my Pricing page for a more detailed breakdown.
Nope.
I don’t actually work with contracts and prefer to keep things as simple as possible.
You can work with me for as long as you’d like and you won’t be bound by any “fine print”.
I specialize in working with small to medium-sized service-based businesses.
I don’t do any e-commerce or brochure-ware type websites, unfortunately.
I do my best work with service-based businesses and stick with that.
If you’re interested in finding more qualified clients and becoming a happier, can-hardly-contain-yourself kind of business owner, take a minute to schedule your free, 30-minute telephone consultation.
We’ll cover a lot of ground and really talk about how to make your website work for you.
I am located just on the north side of Dupont Street, at Campbell Avenue, just east of Symington and west of Lansdowne Avenue.
The Boo Radley’s and Piri Piri Grillhouse restaurants are located on the northwest and northeast corners of Campbell & Dupont.
Turn north onto Campbell Avenue and take the first right (into the driveway) and follow the business units (past Piri Piri) to the end.
I am in Unit 6A (upstairs).
Parking is free.
My Courtice location is located just east of Oshawa, near the intersection of Highway 2 and Townline Road North.
Local landmarks include a Tim Horton’s, McDonald’s and Walmart.
Take Townline Road south of Highway 2 to your first left, which will be Kingsway Gate. Take Kingsway Gate to Empire Crescent (at the stop sign).
I am at the south-east corner of that intersection.
Street parking is free.
