SEO in Ottawa from people who will not promise you a ranking.
Local search, Google Maps, and your Business Profile - SEO services worked every month for Ottawa and Gatineau service businesses. Ask any Ottawa SEO agency what it can move and what nobody can. We will tell you both.
$299 CAD/mo, hosting included. Month-to-month, and no promise of a position.
Nobody can sell you a ranking.
Anyone promising you position one is guessing, and charging you for the guess. Here is the honest split between the work we are accountable for and the things no agency controls.
What we are accountable for
- The technical health of your site - crawlability, speed, structured data
- Page titles and structure that match what Ottawa customers actually type
- Your Google Business Profile, kept complete, correct and current
- Consistent listings and citations across the directories that matter here
- Content aimed at the searches that end in a booked job, not vanity traffic
- A monthly report you can check us against, sent whether or not it flatters us
What nobody controls
- Where Google decides to put you. Nobody outside Google does
- How many reviews you have - we can ask for them, your customers write them
- How long you have been established, which still weighs on local results
- What your competitors spend, publish, or change next month
- Algorithm updates, which arrive without notice and without a changelog
- The calendar. Local SEO moves in months, not in a fortnight
None of this is a reason not to do SEO. It is the reason to judge an agency on the work it ships and the numbers it reports, rather than on the position it promised before it had seen your market.
The SEO is done by the people who hold the code.
Most SEO retainers are handed a site somebody else built and told to make it rank. We build the site, host it, and do the SEO on it - so when something technical is in the way, there is nobody to hand the ticket to.
Ottawa and Gatineau are where most of our work is and where we know the local search landscape best.
- On-page and technical SEO - the parts of ranking we actually control
- Local search and Google Maps 3-Pack optimization
- Google Business Profile management - categories, services, photos, posts
- Local citations and authority building, with consistent name and phone
- Monthly ranking reports, whether the news is good or bad
- Everything in Hosting & Care: managed hosting, SSL, backups, updates
- A listed profile on the Ottawa Service Directory, our own homeowner directory
What does an SEO agency do for an Ottawa business?
It gets your pages into Google, matches each one to a search your customers make, keeps your Google Business Profile complete and accurate, and reports what moved. For a service business in Ottawa or Gatineau the profile needs as much work as the website, because Google builds the map results from Business Profiles.
The best SEO company for your business is the one with clear answers to the questions Google tells buyers to ask. Our guide on how to choose an SEO company quotes five of those questions in Google's words, with the warning signs and what SEO costs in Canada.
Gets the right pages indexed
A page Google has not indexed cannot rank for anything. Google's Search Console help says a site with fewer than 500 pages probably does not need the full Page indexing report: a site: search and the URL Inspection tool show whether the pages that matter are in. We run that check at the start and again after each change, allowing for Google's note that it can take a week or so to start crawling and indexing a new page.
Gives each service a page and a clear title
Google writes the title link in its results itself, from the page's title tag, its main heading and other prominent text, and says that link is often “the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click”. So every service you sell gets its own page, titled with the service and the place the way your customers type them. The same document warns that a title stuffed with repeated keywords “can make your results look spammy to Google and to users”.
Keeps the Business Profile complete
Google's help page names three main factors behind local results, under the headings relevance, distance and prominence. The same page says businesses “with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results”. Distance, how far you are from the person searching, is the one no agency can change. Most of the rest lives in the profile: the right category, the services you sell, your hours and photos, kept current month by month.
Sets the service area the way Google allows
A business that goes to its customers, like the cleaning services and plumbers Google uses as examples, is a service-area business. For those, Google's rules are to take the street address off the profile if customers are not served there, to list up to 20 service areas by city or postal code rather than a radius, and to keep the whole area within about two hours of driving from where the business is based. Ottawa and Gatineau are separate cities in separate provinces, so a business that works on both sides of the river lists each one.
Asks for reviews and replies to them
Only your customers can write reviews, and Google counts them: its help page says prominence draws on “how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have”, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking. An agency can make asking easy after each job, and make sure each review gets a reply.
Writes for the questions customers ask
Before calling an Ottawa contractor, a customer often wants to know what the job costs and whether the City needs a permit for it. Pages that answer those questions are the kind Google says its ranking systems are designed to prioritize: “helpful, reliable information that's created to benefit people, and not content that's created to manipulate search engine rankings”.
Measure, fix, publish, report.
The same four steps every month. The point of writing the baseline down first is that month one has something to be measured against - otherwise “it is working” is just an opinion.
Free scoping call
What you sell, where you serve, and where your work comes from today. If SEO is not the thing holding you back, we will say so.
Baseline and audit
Where you rank right now, what is broken technically, and the state of your Google Business Profile. Written down, so month one has something to be measured against.
Fix and publish
Technical fixes first, then page structure, the Business Profile, citations, and content for the searches your customers make.
Report every month
Rankings, what moved, what did not, and what we are doing next. The SEO portion is month-to-month, so the report has to earn the next month.
In their words, not ours.
The reviews on our Google Business Profile that talk about SEO, in full and exactly as each author published them.
Google rating, read 2026-09-29
Reviews appear in full as published on Google, typos included. People are shown by first name and initial.
A real number, published.
Ottawa SEO is almost always sold as “request a quote”. Ours is on the site: $299 CAD a month on the Hosting + SEO plan - the SEO work plus managed hosting, SSL, backups, updates and priority support, in one flat monthly figure.
Paired with a custom hand-coded build from $499 one-time, that is $4,087 all-in for year one - in writing before we start. The SEO portion is month-to-month, so it has to keep earning the next month. Every project starts with a free scoping call and a written, fixed quote.
Hosting + SEO
$299/mo
CAD · month-to-month SEO
With a build from $499 one-time - $4,087 all-in for year one.
- On-page and technical SEO - the parts of ranking we actually control
- Local search and Google Maps 3-Pack optimization
- Google Business Profile management - categories, services, photos, posts
- Local citations and authority building, with consistent name and phone
- Monthly ranking reports, whether the news is good or bad
What Ottawa businesses ask before hiring an SEO company.
How much does SEO cost in Ottawa?
Ours is published rather than quote-only: $299 CAD a month on the Hosting + SEO plan. That is the SEO work plus managed hosting, SSL, backups, updates and priority support in one flat monthly figure. With a custom build from $499 one-time, that is $4,087 all-in for year one. Every project starts with a free scoping call and a written, fixed quote before anything begins, and the SEO portion is month-to-month.
How long does SEO take to work?
Longer than most people selling it admit. Technical fixes and a properly built Google Business Profile can move local visibility within weeks. Competitive organic terms are a matter of months, and a brand-new domain starts further back than an established one. What we will not do is give you a date for a position. You get a ranking report every month instead, so you can watch the movement - or the absence of it - rather than taking our word for it.
Can you guarantee I will rank #1 in Ottawa?
No, and anyone who does is guessing. Nobody outside Google controls the ranking, and the inputs that matter most - your competition, how long you have been established, how many customers review you - are not things an agency can switch on. What we guarantee is the work: the technical SEO, the page structure, the Google Business Profile, the citations, and a monthly report you can hold us to.
What is the difference between ranking on Google and showing in the Maps 3-Pack?
They are two different results with two different rule sets, and on an Ottawa service search the map pack usually sits above everything else. Organic ranking follows your website: content, structure, technical health, links. The map pack follows your Google Business Profile: verification, the right categories, service areas, photos, and reviews - and reviews weigh heavily there, which is why only your customers can really open that door. It is common for one business to sit high in Maps and far down in organic for the exact same search. We work both, because they are won separately.
Do I need a new website, or can you do SEO on the one I have?
You do not need a new website. The $299/mo Hosting + SEO plan covers both the hosting and the SEO, and it works on the site you already have - hosting is inside that number, not billed on top of it. Bring your current site to the free scoping call and we will tell you honestly whether it can carry the work as it stands, with a written, fixed quote either way. Sometimes the honest answer is that the site is not what is holding you back, and we would rather say so than sell you a rebuild you do not need.
Do you do SEO for AI search as well - ChatGPT, Google's AI answers?
Yes, and more often than not it is the same work. Assistants answer a lot of local questions before anyone clicks through to a website, and what they lean on is the same material local search does: a clean, well-structured page, accurate structured data, a complete Google Business Profile, and consistent listings across directories. We build for both from the start, because doing them separately would mean doing the work twice.
Are you an SEO agency or a freelancer?
Neither label fits exactly. Velogics is a small Ottawa company: we design and hand-code websites, build software, and run the SEO on those sites. The person on your scoping call is one of the people doing the work. Nothing is passed to a subcontractor or a white-label partner, and no account manager sits between you and the work. The parts of an agency worth having are still here: a written, fixed quote, published prices, Terms you can read before you sign, and a monthly report you can hold us to.
Do you do local SEO for businesses in Kanata, Orléans or Barrhaven?
Yes. Kanata, Orléans, Barrhaven and Nepean are all inside the City of Ottawa, so they get the same local SEO services this page describes, and Gatineau is covered too. The part that changes by area is where you take jobs, and that goes into the service area on your Google Business Profile and into the wording of your site where it names the areas you serve. We list the areas you work in and leave the rest off.
Let's find out what is actually in your way.
Tell us what you do, where you serve, and where your work comes from today. On the scoping call we will tell you honestly whether SEO is the thing that moves the needle for you - and if it is not, we will tell you that too.
Comparing quotes? Read what SEO packages actually include line by line first. The profile half of the work is written out in what Business Profile management includes, and the AI-search half in what AEO is.
Only want the site kept running rather than ranked? That is WordPress maintenance and support from $59 a month, on WordPress, Shopify or a site we did not build.
If you want the site, the SEO and the lead capture handled as one job, that is what we do as an Ottawa marketing agency, without the ad buying.