Calgary Search Engine Optimization Services
We are so confident in our SEO services, that we are one of the few Calgary SEO Companies that does not ask for a contract. With our SEO services, earning your business, month-to-month, is good enough for us.
Many Calgary business owners have only recently begun to realize the power of SEO. Having your website rank on the top of Google search listings can increase your revenue anywhere from 25% to 1000%, depending on where you currently rank and how Google search fits into your buying cycle. We have a very successful track record of improving the Google search rankings for Calgary businesses.
Seeing results with SEO work tends to take between 1-3 months. Major moves such as going from page 2 on Google to #1 overall can take 6-12 months. Competition also plays a factor in results and those who wish to rank number one for searches, such as Calgary Realtor, need not only to be patient but to invest in regular and high quality content updates.
Why Choose Matterhorn for your SEO Services?
- Our #1 SEO services concern is in increasing your revenue – our mission is to bring potential customers to you
- We don’t require a contract
- We provide monthly SEO reports with an online face-to-face meeting
- David Howse, 29-year marketing expert, manages your SEO
- David has 14 years of marketing experience in Alberta – he knows the market!
- David teaches SEO, Google Ads, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Word-of-Mouth Marketing at Mount Royal University – he is a trusted expert.
- David is regularly used by Calgary media – he is a respected marketing expert
- We excel at closely integrating your website design and Google Ads with SEO
- We will make sure your Google Ads aren’t on top of your ranked SEO terms
- We’ll make sure you get the most out of your website; whether your website is 4, 10, 20, or 100+ pages, we’ll maximize your traffic and conversions.
- Pick up your phone and call us – we can help you reach your marketing goals
SEO Client Reviews
Though no one can guarantee SEO results (it would be unethical to do so since we don’t control Google), the below testimonial speaks for itself. We’ve managed Cawston & Associate’s search engine optimization efforts for the past 15 years! Read the below review and ask your self, “Is Matterhorn the kind of SEO expert you want working for you?” The answer is obvious.
Our SEO Prices
Calgary SEO Report
Here is an actual SEO report we deliver to our clients once a month. Our clients always know exactly what search terms we are ranking on the top of Google and what their website traffic looks like. We also set up a shared folder where more complete reports are loaded if our clients want to see more data.
Search Engine Optimization Services
All plans get the same SEO services including monthly reporting. The difference is in the frequency and depth of execution required to get the results you need. SEO results are a measure of how much better your SEO work is than our competition’s SEO. Our job is to give you better SEO than your competition.
Some of our SEO tactics include:
- Google Analytics Setup
- Keyword Research
- Competition Analysis
- Google Map Optimization
- Onsite SEO including
- SSL Setup
- Title & Description Tags
- H1, H2, H3 Tags
- Image optimization
- Website Speed/Compression
- Content writing
- Fixing website errors such as:
- Broken Links
- Non Https links, etc.
- Quality outbound links
- Improving URLs
- and many more!
- Off Site SEO
- Quality backlinks
- Backlink diversity
- Earned Backlinks
- Citations
- Content writing for 3rd Parties
Introduction to SEO
Take five minutes to watch this video. Once you do, you will have a good understanding of how we approach Search Engine Optimization for your business.
SEO Services
Below is a partial list of companies that use our SEO services. Matterhorn has been providing Search Engine Optimization services to Calgary businesses since 2008.
SEO Success Stories
Here are a few of our many SEO success stories:
The Borger Group: Google Calgary Underground Construction Companies and you will find them near the top of the search listing. In 2012, when we started doing SEO for Borger, they were no higher than page six of any relevant search term. Today, Borger is on the first page for dozens of their most important search terms.
David Howse Marketing: Google Calgary Marketing Companies, and they too, are at the top of the Calgary listing for marketing companies.
Rocky Point Academy: Google Calgary Dyslexia and they have been number one on Google for a long time. As we built RockyPointAcademy.com, we were able to engineer some of the most important Google search elements into the website. With our proprietary website design and off-site search work, the owners of this Calgary business continually thank us for making their phone ring with new business like never before.
Cawston and Associates: We have worked with Bill and Trevor Cawston since 2009. Our SEO service work is responsible for growing their revenues by 400%. When it comes to relevant tax consultant lawyer or consultant work, they rule Calgary!
March 13, 2018 Update:
We now provide SEO services for these Calgary Businesses:
- Boulder Creek Community Development
- Heritage Hills Community Development
- Metaphysical Center
November 26, 2016 Update:
We also manage SEO services for:
- TriView Capital
- Rocky Point Academy was so happy with our search engine optimization work that they hired us to do SEO for their Calgary Autism website.
- Bossi Construction has hired us to do SEO services for their four Calgary construction companies
- Our own website, the one you are reading now, has the best Calgary SEO of all technology/marketing companies.
Call us today top learn how we can put your website on the first-page of Google for search terms relevant to your business
To learn more about SEO click:
Below is a set of videos that, if digital marketing isn’t that important to your business, you can do some SEO on your own.
SEO Tutorial Part 1 of 9
These 9 tabs combined, contained our SEO tutorial for anyone who wants to do their own SEO. These tutorials are provided without warranty and all readers should understand that SEO and Google’s rules and search algorithm is constantly changing. It is possible that some of these techniques may be outdated and even harmful to your website’s ranking on Google. While we recommend that you always use an SEO professional who engages in ethical/white hat SEO techniques, this tutorial is for those who can not afford professional SEO services but who will research everything expressed on this page in much further detail before implementing the discussed tools and tactics. These videos assume good knowledge of website design, server admin, and the basics of search engine optimization. The purpose of these videos to to help you integrate several SEO and Web tools in to one SEO strategy. The context assumes you will be providing SEO services in Calgary. We’re going to do everything from picking a domain, right down to the analytics of getting data. In this presentation, we’re going to:- Do an SEO and Google AdWords review\
- Choose a domain name
- Use Google Keyword Planner
- Buy a domain and set-up hosting. That’s out of scope but we’ll assume it has been purchased.
- Install a WordPress, that’s out of scope too so we’re going to assume that is done.
- Set up Google Analytics
- Set up Google Webmaster
- Set up AdWords
- Add plug-ins to the website
- Go through Yoast SEO, WP cache, Google Analytics
- Install Google Analytics, connect Google Analytics, Webmaster.
- Create content — so we’re going to create a few pages, and we’re going to use Google Keyword Planner, and some SEO knowledge to help us.
- Lastly, we will set up a Google Ad campaign, and then a little introduction to Google Analytics.
Before we do the above steps, we’re going to look at some basic SEM terminology:
SEM – Search Engine Marketing. SEM is purely about getting free traffic. False. SEM is about getting relevant traffic, either through SEO or through AdWords. What’s the most important factor for organic ranking? Some say getting links from authority sites is the most important factor for organic ranking. Having links from a high-authority domain going to a website doesn’t necessarily mean anything unless there’s some good content on the website and you have other thing going. When all things are being equal, getting links from authority website is the most important, but it’s no good it has unless a good website backing it up; that’s on topic of what you’re trying to do. The technical term for the version of the document that you want search engines to pay attention to is referred as the Canonical version. You could have multiple content on a website and kind of have them set as different landing pages, and you can have it set that Google understand that this one page is the page we want to look at, and the rest we don’t care about. Search engines pay attention to the canonical version. In the link example [displayed on screen] http://example.com/blog/search/ “Example.com” is the domain. In the above link, “.com” is the TLD or Top-level domain. “.ca” is a TLD, as well as, “.co.uk”, “.org”, “.net”, “.info”. The whole link together, URL, is Uniform Resource Locator. If Google encounters a “robots” file — so a robots.txt file is something search engines look for to get instructions of which pages to should look at or ignore. In essence, the most basic robot.txt file is just a little file that sits in your root domain and all it says is “user agent everybody (star means everybody), disallow, go scroll my website, look for anything”. You can have the option “Disallow”. I’m going to do robots.txt for WordPress. User agent star means everybody. Allow: you’re allowed to go into my uploads folder, Disallow: don’t go into my plug-ins folder, and don’t scan the readme.html file, I don’t want you bringing that up in search results. We don’t need to go into this too much, but if you have pages that you don’t want to be crawled, you could put in a “disallow/pagename”. You might have a private page set for only people that, and you don’t want to set up a password or something, but only people with the link can see it. Then “disallow” will prevent Google from crawling the page and adding that page to the search ranking. But if you have the actual address you can still go directly there. 301 code is how Google and pages move, and then redirect. I’m going to show you an example, I used to have my website at WordPress at davidhowse.wordpress.com. If I put that in, it takes me to davidhowsemarketing.com/calgary-marketing, my marketing blog. I pay WordPress.com $10 a year, the free one that is limited, to keep that redirect so anytime any of those old links and stuff that went to that site, go to this site. That’s a 301 redirect and you can redirect a page, or a whole website.SEO Tutorial Part 3 of 9
This is a continuation of our nine-part SEO tutorial. The tutorial is presented by David Howse who has provided SEO services in Calgary since 2008. To install Google Analytics, search Google Analytics in Google. When you click to sign in, click Analytics. So what happens is, if I didn’t already have the website setup, it will prompt me to put in the information but I’m going to add a new website to my domain. I’m just going to click the Admin tab down here [referring to the dashboard website], and then under Account I’m just going to auto-prompt it because there’s no account. Note that I have 17 out of a 100 Google Analytics accounts you can have 100 domains in it, so in other words, a hundred Google Analytics properties. Now, I’m going to create a new account. Fill in the options: Website or mobile app? What’s your new account name? I’m just going to call it this [CalgaryBusiness] because it will obviously tell me what it is. What’s the website name? It’s just copying the property. What’s your URL? [calgarybusiness.ca] Select an industry. Now, I’m not sure how good or worthwhile this is, but if you see something there that reflects your industry, then check it. Time zone, put Canada and Mountain Time. Now here is Google’s request. Do you want to share data with Google? I usually just say no, because, I see no reason. Why give an account specialist your phone number? I don’t want any phone calls. Okay, the tracking ID. Canada, I’m going to agree to their terms. I accept the terms. And then, I view a very special page. So we get the tag, there’s the tag. Now, if I was using the old-school HTML website, I would take this whole tag, paste it in my HTML (almost nobody has those kind of websites now). Now that we have Google Analytics, we’re going to jump back to our website. Remember the dashboard [of WordPress]? Go to plug-ins, add new, and, we’re going to type in Google Analytics. Now, when we’re talking about plug-ins, that’s a little bit outside the scope of this class, because now you’re web developing a bit. Make sure your plug-ins are always up to date, because sometimes vulnerabilities are discovered and your site could get hacked (that’s one of the downsides of WordPress. There’s lots of ways to hack into WordPress and they’re always discovering patches for it, so make sure you keep your plugins up to date. Now my favorite Google Analytics plug-in got bought out or taken over by Monster Insights. It’s a little bit of a bloatware, but in any case, I’ll install it. It does a lot more than what I want. Click install, then activate it and go to settings. Now, I can authenticate with my Google account, or I can manually enter the code. “Already have a Google account?” “Don’t know if you’ve set up Google Analytics?” You can authenticate there, or– click here to authenticate manually. And then, see this? Enter your UA code? All it wants is this little bit right here [referring to the tag from the previous Google Analytics]. Get back into the plugin, there’s my code. Automatic updates? Yes, put in automatic updates just saves time with changes. Google Analytics is now installed. So let’s go back. That was it, done, and now it’s automatically going to be in every page, and every post I create. Now set up Google Webmaster. When I sign in, it will prompt me to add my first property, but I already have a bunch of properties here. I’m just going to go add property, and all it wants is my domain name. I’m going to add http://calgary-business.ca, then it wants to verify that I own that domain by adding an HTML file to my website. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go through the alternate method and verify with Google Analytics. After I’ve installed Google Analytics, I have control of the site, therefore it’s going to accept the fact that it knows I have Google Analytics, therefore you can have Google Webmaster. I click verify. Congratulations, done. That’s all you have to do. It’s the fastest way to do it too. As you see now, no data is available because we’ve just installed this one, the plug-in and we’ve just installed Google Webmaster, the site’s new and it is barely going to get any traffic anyway. It might take some time to get enough data. So under crawl, just some important things here. 05:38 Google. If I create updates to my website, I can click fetch and render, it’s going to go crawl my website, find any updates, and put that into the Google search rankings probably within a couple of hours and your website’s updated on Google. We’re going to come back to this in a bit. What I want to do is go back to our slide. Okay, we’re done with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster. Now Google AdWords. This is the end of Part 3 of our SEO tutorial. If you prefer someone else do all of these steps for you, we would be more that happy to offer you our SEO services.SEO Tutorial Part 4 of 9
This fourth part of our nine-part SEO tutorial. The tutorial is presented by David Howse who has provided SEO services in Calgary since 2008. Below is the transcript of the video but a tip on Adwords versus SEO. Google Ads are great because they target the same searches you want in your SEO but the ads can start running within 24 hours. SEO can take 3 or more months to show results. In the long term, I prefer SEO as I have found it about 400% better than Ads. In the short term, Ads infinitely outperform SEO because SEO tends to do very poorly in the first 3 or so months. Set up Google AdWords then sign in. Now this was the same process as the Google Keyword Planner, they’re part of the same tool. You can’t have the full Google AdWords unless you put in your credit card. You get limited access to Google AdWords because what’s the point of being in there without credit cards and Google kind of wants to limit that by only having serious people use AdWords. I click my domain name, we’ve already gone through that prompt that you’ve seen before about entering your credit card number. Click, all campaigns, and then click the plus sign to add a campaign, then you’re going to search ads. Click this, I want website traffic. You got sales, leads, website traffic. You can create a campaign without a goal too, click Continue to Campaign name: “Calgary business grand opening”. Probably not a good topic for a business site, but if it was a store or anything, just you give it any name you want. Do you want to be in the search network, and the display network? Or just the search? I just want people doing Google searches. I don’t want Google search partners. I just want Google. Straight-up Google. Ads can appear near Google search results and other Google sites when people search for terms that are relevant to your keywords. I don’t want partners, I don’t want display network and I don’t want the display partners. Just Google search. Enter another location, so default to Canada. Enter another location. I’m going to click advanced search and I’m going to say Calgary. I could have also done radius and set Calgary – 20 kilometers, this does a circle around the city, as opposed to city limits. You can do both too. It doesn’t matter if they overlap. Click save. Okay, English is fine. Budget: enter the average you want to spend each day, $10 a day, that’s $300 a month, and delivery method I could use standard or accelerated. I’m going to do standard so it’s kind of more even. What do you want to focus on? Conversions: I want clicks. Automatically maximize clicks, I’m going to manually set my bid and I will raise them if I want to. Select a bid strategy, help increase conversions with enhanced — no, I don’t want enhanced. Set the end date to the end of the month, Now you can add additional links to your ad, so extension, I don’t have any other pages so I’m not going to. Once I create more pages, I’ll come back to that. Callout extensions, let’s see, new call extension. Offering something free like a marketing tool? Oh I went two words over. How can we say free business plan template in two less characters? Biz plan, yeah. Ah. Free biz plan template. Awesome. Very creative. Okay. Save that. Additional settings: my phone number will be in my ad. Ad rotation: prefer best performing ads? And I want that, so if I set up multiple ads, it can rotate evenly, oh not supported anymore. Optimize for conversion? Do not optimize. Rotate ads indefinitely. I want the best performing ads to show up. If I make five ads, show the ones that get the most clicks. Schedule ads all day, or I can set up hours for the ads and days; maybe I don’t want them to run on the weekend. We’re back here, setting up an ad and trying keyword ideas, and this is just going to be for business plans. I want to promote my business plan writing service. I’m going to offer a free business plan template or something. My goal is to give them enough that they get confused and then want to hire me to do it for them, so business plan—over here’s going to be counts, clicks a day, average cost per click. Now I can go with business plan template but I don’t want somebody to find– searching for a business plan template because they’re the ones looking to do it for free, so when you do keyword ads, be strategic about keywords. Maybe I just want “business plan”, “business plan writer”, “business plan writers”, “business plan consulting”, and we’ll find out some later. In the way I had it written, “business” and “plan” just have to appear anywhere, the broad match in that search. Okay, now if I put it in quotes, they have to appear together in the search, in other words, can come before and after. We’re at 5 clicks a day. They can search anything “business plan”, anything with “business plan writer”, anything with “business plan writers”, and anything with “business plan consulting”. I’m going to save and continue. Clicks are usually, it depends on the topic, but some others pay 20 dollars a click, some people get away with 50 cents a click. Depends on the topic and how competitive it is. If I can make $500 on a transaction, how much am I willing to pay and it takes 10 clicks to get a sale, for example. Just say my profit is $250 on that $500 sale. I’d be willing to spend, you know, 20 bucks a click. New ad, final URL and here’s the thing. I’m kind of going too far into this, because we have a website without content. Hypothetical scenario – so let’s go back to our website.SEO Tutorial Part 5 of 9
Let’s go back to our website – into plug-ins, then click add new. Search Yoast SEO. That’s the SEO plug-in, add new activate it. For caching, I use W3 Total Cache. You can try the other ones. Different servers or hosting accounts prefer other compression/caching plug-ins. I’ll install it now, then activate. Now there’s a lot of settings to activate in W3 Total Cache, but I won’t get into that. We now have SEO, caching, Google Analytics. And I’m going to show you a good one. It’s outside the scope of this class, but if we go plug-ins, add new, it’s called WordFence. It’s the best security I could find, there might be better, something paid for, but this is a free plug-in through WordPress that cuts out a lot of hack attempts on your website. Say somebody tried to log-in to your website, and failed the password attempt 3 times. This program will actually block the IP from trying again for a certain period of time. There’s some configuration to do. Just on its basic install, as it is, it’s a lot better than having nothing. Probably the biggest weakness of WordPress, is the amount of time it gets hacked. FOr the install I click, No thanks to the premium version, it’s now doing a scan. Our first round of plugins are now installed. If you look at our website right now, we have really no content, there’s nothing. So, we’re going to click new and then page. I’m going to call this page business plan writer. Actually we already typed in “Calgary-business.ca” The word Calgary is in my URL for this page, so it’s called Business Plan Writer or Business plan writing. I had to edit this because it won’t automatically keep changing (the actual web-page address). This is going to be the final URL of this page. Calgary-business.ca/business-plan-writing. Adding hyphens after the domain name is not bad. Having them in the domain name can be bad. But we’re good. The page is going to be about business plan writing. You go over to visual mode, turn that to the H1, 800 words of content and a couple of pictures. Use your imagination. Okay now the Yoast plug-in down here, focused keyword, this page has all got business plan writing. As you saw in the keyword tool, Google Adwords, under Keyword Planner, “business plan writing”. We got “writing a business plan”, “business plan”, “business plan template”. A lot of people want to do it on their own. “How to make a business plan”, “business plan sample”, “business plan format”, “business plan proposal”, “how to write a business proposal”. There’s a lot of people searching for this, and then a lot of people paying ads as well, or Google suggesting. I’m going to keep it business plan writing. Okay, so that’s my H1. It’s going to be my focused keyword. If this focused keyword doesn’t mean anything to Google, it just helps Yoast do its scoring. “Business plan writing” is my title, “By David Howse”. And for my description I need content – I need to write a bunch of content here, so. What I wrote in here-the description – will be good to be up here. “We have 25 years of business plan writing and have helped many Calgary business owners get financing and started on the right foot.” I’m not going to write 800 words.SEO Tutorial Part 6 of 9
This is how it works in WordPress by default. I’m going to publish this. Right now, it’s saying SEO is okay, but if you go down, it’s going to tell us some obvious SEO weaknesses.- The recommended minimum content is 300 words, add more content relevant to the topic
- No internal links appear on this page, consider adding some as appropriate
- No outbound links appear.