How to choose an SEO company in Ottawa: ask what Google tells you to ask.
Choose the SEO company that shows you the search terms you appear for, keeps every account in your name, and can say what it will change in the first month. Google supplies most of the questions that separate one provider from another. Its own hiring page even says that if you run a small local business, “you can probably do much of the work yourself.”
Most pages ranking for this question are agencies describing what to look for in an agency. This one starts from Google Search Central’s hiring advice and adds what it leaves out for a business here: where to report a misleading provider in Canada, and what distance and two official languages do to a local search.
Updated 2026-09-30
What a good local SEO engagement includes
A service business in Ottawa shows up in two places on one results page: the map results, which come from its Google Business Profile, and the ordinary links, which come from its website. Google’s Business Profile help says local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence is based partly on “how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.” A proposal should name work on both halves, and you should be able to see every piece of it.
| Part | The work | What you can check |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | The right primary and secondary categories, your services written out, a service area that matches where you take jobs, current hours and photos, and replies to reviews. | The profile itself, each change dated in the report, and your own Google Account listed as primary owner. |
| On-page and technical | Titles and headings in the words customers type, internal links between related pages, and fixes for pages Google cannot crawl or index. | A list of the pages changed with what each said before, and the indexing report in your own Search Console. |
| Content | A new page when a real search needs one: a service you offer, or an area you actually take jobs in. | Each new page, and the search term it was written for. |
| Citations and reviews | Your name, address and phone the same on every directory that lists you, and an easy way to ask finished customers for a review. | The list of listings with whose login each sits under, and the review link you send customers. |
| Reporting | The search terms you appeared for, with clicks and positions, what shipped that month, and what comes next. | The search terms themselves, every month, including the ones that fell. |
A plan that covers one half leaves the other to chance. Website work alone does nothing for the profile, and profile work alone sends people to pages nobody has fixed.
Reviews are the one line a provider cannot deliver by itself. It can make asking easy, with a short link and a message you send when a job is done. Whether a customer writes one is up to the customer.
Questions to ask an SEO company before you sign
Google Search Central’s page “Do you need an SEO?”, last updated on 2026-06-05, lists questions to put to any SEO you interview. Five of them are below in Google’s words, each with what a useful answer contains. The last three are ours. Google’s page touches on two of them in its warnings, and the third decides what you keep when the work ends.
| Ask | From | A useful answer |
|---|---|---|
| “Do you follow the Google Search Essentials (previously known as Webmaster Guidelines)?” | A yes that comes with examples of what they will not do, such as buying links. The Search Essentials are Google's published rules, spam policies included. | |
| “How do you measure your success?” | Measures you can check yourself: search terms, clicks and calls. A score from the provider's own tool is a number only the provider can produce. | |
| “What's your experience in my country/city?” | Ottawa specifics without prompting: how to cover the parts of a large city you serve, and French pages if you take jobs in Gatineau. | |
| “Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?” | Yes, in writing, with dates, in the monthly report. | |
| “Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?” | Examples, plus a past client you can phone. Google also tells you to check references by asking past clients whether the SEO was useful and easy to work with. | |
| Whose name is on the Business Profile, Search Console and the domain? | Add this | Yours, as owner, on all three. The provider works as a manager or user you can remove without its permission. |
| Where does your advice come from? | Add this | Google's documentation, cited. Google suggests asking whether a provider cites official Google documentation, and whether its AEO or GEO advice matches Google's guidance for AI features. |
| Who does the work each month? | Add this | A named person. If the work goes to a subcontractor, you want to know before you sign, because Google holds you responsible for what is done to your site. |
Google adds a test you can run in the first meeting: “See if the SEO is interested in you and your business.” Its page says a good SEO asks what makes your business unique, who your competitors are and how your customers find you. A provider that quotes a package before asking any of that is reading from a template.
What changes when the business is in Ottawa
Two facts about this city shape what any provider can do for you. A good one brings both up before you have to.
Distance is set by the searcher, and Ottawa is large
Google defines distance in local results as “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”. The City of Ottawa covers 2,788.20 square kilometres of land, according to Statistics Canada’s 2021 census profile, from Kanata in the west to Orléans in the east. One Business Profile at one address will not appear in the map results for everyone across that area, and no provider can change where a searcher is standing.
What a provider can do is make relevance and prominence as strong as they will go, and give each area where you take jobs a page that says so. Ask how they plan to reach the parts of the city you serve that sit far from your address. “We will get you to the top across Ottawa” is a promise about the one factor nobody controls.
More than a third of the city knows both official languages
In the same census, 367,035 of 1,006,965 Ottawa residents, about 36%, reported knowing both English and French. Gatineau sits across the river in Quebec. If you take jobs there, ask whether the provider writes French pages, and who writes them.
Google’s multilingual guidance says it “uses the visible content of your page to determine its language”, recommends a separate URL for each language version, and advises against side-by-side translations and automatic redirects by language. A French paragraph pasted under the English one, on the same URL, is the side-by-side version it warns about.
Red flags when hiring an SEO company
Most of these come straight from Google’s hiring page, and each one can be spotted before you sign anything.
A guaranteed ranking
Google’s instruction fits in one line: “If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.” Offering your money back does not change the answer, because Google and the businesses you compete with still decide the position.
A link package
“You should never have to link to an SEO,” Google writes, and it tells you to avoid providers who talk about “link popularity schemes or submitting your site to thousands of search engines.” A line reading “10 backlinks a month” is a quota of links placed to order, which is the kind of scheme Google means. Google warns that techniques breaking its spam policies can bring “a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index.” The site at risk is yours.
A contract that outlasts your accounts
Some SEO work does take months, and a 12-month term is a different thing from a timeline. The bigger risk is what you are left holding when any contract ends. Three accounts decide that: the Business Profile, the Search Console property and the domain. Each should be in your name, with the provider added as someone you can remove.
Search Console calls the top role owner, with full control over the property, and a full user “has view rights to all data and can take some actions”. Keep the first role and give the provider the second. Google’s owner and manager rules for a Business Profile work the same way, and our management guide explains why the business should be primary owner.
A report that hides the search terms
Search Console’s Performance report has a Queries view that, in Google’s words, “groups your data by the search query users typed”, with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for each. That list is free, and it is the list of searches your business appeared for. A monthly report showing a visibility score or a traffic line in place of those terms is hiding the thing you are paying to change.
A screenshot of a ranking proves little either way. Google notes that results are “specific to the time, place, device, and recent history of the person searching”, so the provider’s search from its own office is not the one your customer runs in Barrhaven.
An audit that asks for the keys
A first audit only needs to read. Google says to “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access)”, and that an audit should give you “realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved.” A restricted user in Search Console has “simple view rights on most data”, which is enough to look. Nobody needs your Google password to audit a site.
An audit padded with things Google ignores
Google’s SEO Starter Guide has a section titled “Things we believe you shouldn’t focus on”. An audit whose top findings come from that section is selling work Google says does not matter for ranking. The usual ones: a missing keywords meta tag, which Google Search does not use; a word count below some target, when Google says there is “no magical word count target”; headings out of order; the same page reachable at two URLs, which Google says will not cause a manual action; and a plan to raise your E-E-A-T, which Google says is not a ranking factor.
Tool scores deserve the same care. Google’s hiring page says third-party SEO tools “don’t have access to Google’s internal ranking data”.
A cold email about your rankings
“Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that email you out of the blue,” Google writes, adding that it receives these emails too. An unsolicited audit was written before anyone asked about your business, which is the opposite of the interest Google tells you to look for.
Secrecy about the method
One more of Google’s warnings covers everything above: “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.” Its reason is that an SEO who creates deceptive content for you can get your site removed from the index, and “Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.”
How SEO pricing models differ
SEO is usually sold one of four ways. Shopify’s Canadian site, in a guide dated 2025-12-11, prices local SEO under three of them: $150 to $300 an hour, $1,000 to $5,000 a month, or $1,500 to $5,000 and up as a one-time project, and notes that local SEO varies with the number of locations. The page does not state a currency. The fourth model, payment tied to rankings, has no published range we could cite.
| Model | What you are buying | Ask about |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly | Time, usually for an audit, a fix or advice. | Nobody is working between visits. Fine for a one-off job, thin for the profile and reporting work that repeats every month. |
| Monthly retainer | Ongoing work on the profile, the pages and the report. | A written list of what happens each month, and how much notice ends the arrangement. |
| One-time project | A defined piece of work, such as an audit or a rebuild with SEO built in. | Who carries out the findings, and what you keep afterwards. |
| Pay for performance | A fee tied to positions for a chosen list of terms. | Who chose the terms. A position on a phrase nobody searches is easy to reach and earns nothing, so ask for the monthly searches behind each one. |
The monthly number is half a comparison. The other half is what each line of a package is, and how to read an SEO package line by line does that with Google’s spam policy next to the lines it names.
Our own monthly figure is published rather than quoted on request. What it buys, and the things no budget buys at any price, are set out in what SEO costs in Ottawa.
What no SEO company can promise
These five are outside any provider’s control, whatever the contract says.
- A position. Google says even a page that meets every requirement is not owed a place: “Indexing and serving isn't guaranteed.”
- Where the searcher is standing. Distance is one of the three things local results rest on, and a provider cannot change it.
- Reviews. Your customers decide whether to write one, and Google counts them toward prominence.
- A date. Google's starter guide says “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months.”
- A mention in an AI answer. The page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet like any other result, and Google decides the rest.
So judge a provider on the work it ships and the search terms it reports, and hold it to dates for that work. A date for a position is one it cannot keep.
Is SEO still relevant in 2026?
Yes, and Google says so in the opening lines of its documentation on AI search: “The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode).” Its hiring page, last updated on 2026-06-05, lists “Optimizing for generative AI” among the useful services an SEO provides. The answer to a search now sometimes appears inside an AI summary, and the same work earns a place there.
Is SEO dead now with AI?
No. AI Overviews and AI Mode link to web pages, and Google’s precondition for being one of those links is ordinary SEO: the page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet. Google’s hiring page now uses the new labels itself, telling buyers to ask whether a provider’s “AEO” or “GEO” advice lines up with its official guidance. A provider selling AI visibility as a separate product with separate tricks is selling something Google’s documentation says needs no special optimization.
What is the 80/20 rule in SEO?
It is the Pareto principle applied to search: the idea that a small share of the work produces most of the result. Google publishes no such rule, so treat any percentage attached to it as a rule of thumb. The useful version for a local business is a question to put to a provider: which few pieces of work will you do first, and why those? A good answer is specific to your market and names pages, the profile or reviews. A weak one is the whole package, in the order it is printed.
How much does SEO cost in Canada?
Shopify’s Canadian site puts local SEO at $1,000 to $5,000 a month, in a guide dated 2025-12-11 that states no currency. Ours is $299 CAD a month on the Hosting + SEO plan, with hosting included, as published on our pricing page on 2026-09-30. The range is wide because the models differ: an hourly rate, a retainer and a project price measure different things, as the pricing table above shows.
How we answer the same questions
Every question on this page applies to us, and our own site answered them this way on 2026-09-30. The SEO is $299 CAD a month with hosting inside it, and the SEO portion is month-to-month. The person on the scoping call is one of the people doing the work, and nothing is passed to a subcontractor or a white-label partner. The monthly report goes out whether or not it flatters us. We do not sell link building or ads management.
What our SEO services in Ottawa include, step by step, is on the page for them. If you are weighing us against another provider, bring its proposal to a free scoping call and we will read it against this list with you, including any part where the other proposal fits you better.
To book it, phone +1 (613) 383-5521 and our AI receptionist will find a time.
Questions people ask next about hiring for SEO.
1Should a small business hire an SEO company or do SEO itself?
Google's own answer is that if you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself, starting with its SEO Starter Guide. Hiring makes sense when your time is worth more than the fee, or when the work needs changes to code you cannot make. Even then, Google recommends learning the basics first, so you can tell when a provider suggests a technique it discourages. The starter guide is free, and reading it makes every proposal easier to judge.
2Does an SEO company need to be based in Ottawa?
Google's hiring questions ask about experience in your country or city, and say nothing about where the provider's office is. Local experience is knowledge a provider from elsewhere has to learn: which suburbs you actually serve, how far one Business Profile reaches across a city of 2,788 square kilometres, and whether your customers across the river in Gatineau search in French. Ask any provider, local or not, to describe your market back to you before they quote a price.
3How do I check an SEO company's references?
Ask for two or three past clients you can phone, and put Google's questions to them: did the SEO provide useful service, was it easy to work with, and did it produce positive results? Then ask one of your own: do they still own their Business Profile, their Search Console property and their domain now the work has ended? A reference the provider will not let you contact directly is a case study, and the seller wrote it.
4Can an SEO company get my business into Google's AI Overviews?
It can make your pages eligible, and anyone promising more than that is guessing. Google's documentation says a page must be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet to be shown as a supporting link, and that indexing and serving are not guaranteed. Google's hiring page also tells you to ask whether a provider's AEO or GEO advice lines up with its official guidance on AI features. Ask to see the guidance they are working from.
5What can I do if an SEO company misled me?
First take back access: remove the provider from your Business Profile and Search Console, and change any password you shared. Google's hiring page points to the US Federal Trade Commission and to econsumer.gov. In Canada, the Competition Bureau's complaint form covers a company or person you believe has broken the Competition Act. The Bureau says it is not a consumer protection agency and cannot get you a refund or settle a dispute, so any money owed is a separate matter.
6What is the difference between an SEO audit and SEO work?
An audit is the diagnosis. Google says it should give you realistic estimates of improvement and an estimate of the work involved. SEO work is carrying out that list, month after month, on the site and the profile. You can buy them separately, but read the audit for how many findings Google says do not matter. A long list of missing meta keywords and short word counts is padding, and it makes the work that follows look bigger than it is.
Every quotation on this page was read off its source on 2026-09-30. The Google rows are the hiring advice and the documentation it points to; the two government rows are the census figures and the Canadian complaint route. The price row is one publisher's table, the last row is our own published pages, and nothing here is drawn from any client's account.
- Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO? (hiring advice)
Read 2026-09-30, last updated 2026-06-05. Source of the five interview questions printed in full, and of these passages: a small local business “can probably do much of the work yourself”; “See if the SEO is interested in you and your business”; at the audit stage “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)”, with “realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved”; third-party tools “don't have access to Google's internal ranking data”; “If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else”; “You should never have to link to an SEO”; the cold-email and secrecy warnings; “Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire”; “Optimizing for generative AI” among useful services; and the question on “AEO” “GEO” advice.
- Google Search Central, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
Read 2026-09-30, last updated 2025-12-10. Source of “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months”, and of the section “Things we believe you shouldn't focus on”: Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag, there is “no magical word count target”, heading order does not matter to Search, duplicate content under several URLs will not cause a manual action, and E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor.
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website
Read 2026-09-30, last updated 2025-12-10. Source of the opening sentence, “The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode)”, of the supporting-link precondition (indexed, and eligible to show with a snippet), and of “Indexing and serving isn't guaranteed.”
- Google Business Profile Help, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
Read 2026-09-30. Source of the definition of distance, “how far each business is from the customer who's searching”, and of prominence being based partly on “how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.”
- Search Console Help, Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup
Read 2026-09-30. Source of the four metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR and average position), the “queries” dimension that “groups your data by the search query users typed”, and “Search results are specific to the time, place, device, and recent history of the person searching.”
- Search Console Help, Managing owners, users, and permissions
Read 2026-09-30. Source of the roles: an owner “has full control over properties in Search Console”, a full user “has view rights to all data and can take some actions”, and a restricted user “has simple view rights on most data”.
- Google Search Central, Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites
Read 2026-09-30, last updated 2025-12-10. Source of “Google uses the visible content of your page to determine its language”, the recommendation to use different URLs for each language version, and the advice against side-by-side translations and automatic language redirects.
- Statistics Canada, Census Profile, 2021 Census of Population: Ottawa, City (CV)
Read 2026-09-30. Source of the land area, 2,788.20 square kilometres, the 2021 population of 1,017,449, and knowledge of official languages: 367,035 of 1,006,965 residents (excluding institutional residents) reported knowing both English and French, about 36%.
- Competition Bureau Canada, Complaint form
Read 2026-09-30. Source of the form's scope, a company or individual believed to have contravened the Competition Act, and of the Bureau's statement that it “is not a consumer protection agency and cannot act on your behalf to obtain reimbursement or to settle a dispute between two parties.”
- Shopify Canada, “How Much Does SEO Cost in 2026? Pricing Guide”
Published 2025-12-11, read 2026-09-30. Source of its local SEO row, which it says varies with the number of locations: $150 to $300 hourly, $1,000 to $5,000 monthly, and $1,500 to $5,000+ one-time. The page states no currency.
- Our own pricing, SEO and packages pages
/pricing, /seo-ottawa and /guides/seo-packages, read 2026-09-30. Hosting + SEO at $299 CAD a month with hosting included; “The SEO portion is month-to-month”; the person on the scoping call is one of the people doing the work, with nothing passed to a subcontractor or a white-label partner; a monthly report sent whether or not it flatters us; link building and ads management not sold.