SEO
SEO services in Thunder Bay
People here are already searching for what you sell. They are finding somebody else. Usually not because your competitor is better, but because their site answers the question and yours does not — and it is usually fixable with a handful of pages rather than a campaign. Mostly I do this for trades and professional practices here, where one new customer is worth enough that a few searches a month matters.
From $1,200/mo · ongoing; begins with an audit from $2,500
The problem
Local search in a city this size works differently
Most SEO advice is written for markets with thousands of searches a month. Thunder Bay is not one, and that changes the arithmetic rather than the method: a term worth real money here might be searched a few dozen times, and if one of those is somebody about to spend four figures with you, the volume was never the point. Judging a local term by how small the number looks is the usual way to write off the demand that actually pays.
The other thing that is different: look at who currently ranks for searches about this city. Most of them are not in it. They are national firms running one page per town, Thunder Bay among them, and they hold those positions on the size of their domain rather than on knowing anything about here. It shows — pages like that describe a city in the same sentences they use for the other thirty-nine.
That is the opening: a page written by somebody who knows the market can answer questions those pages cannot.
Method
From $1,200/mo
One change per page, per cycle
Each cycle, each page gets one deliberate change. Then we wait and read what happened.
Two changes in a month buys a movement nobody can attribute, which means next month's decision is a guess with a report attached. That is the ordinary way monthly search work is run, and it is why so many people have paid for it for a year and cannot say what it bought.
What you are paying for is a decision about what to change next that you can see the reason for — and, over a run of them, more of the right people in this city finding you and picking up the phone. In month two that sometimes means hearing this moved and I do not yet know why, which is the only version still worth the money in month three.
From $1,200/mo · ongoing; begins with an audit from $2,500. The diagnosis comes first, because a monthly arrangement entered before anyone knows what is wrong is the version you have probably already paid for once. If it turns out you do not need the ongoing half, I will say so and we can stop at the diagnosis.
The work
What the work actually is
In the order it runs. The first step regularly changes everything after it.
- What people here actually type. Which is reliably not what you call your own services. Mine is a fair example: some people here search for search engine optimization and the rest type three letters. Yours will have a split like it, and it will not be the words on your brochure. This comes before any change to the site, and it is the step usually skipped.
- Local SEO and the map results. For a local business the map listings sit above the ordinary results and are won on different things — your category, where you are, your reviews, whether your details agree across the web. Often the fastest part to move.
- Technical SEO. Whether the site can be crawled, rendered and indexed at all. Unglamorous, and it caps everything else.
- The pages themselves. One page for each thing somebody searches for, built around what they are trying to find rather than around how your business is arranged inside, and no two of your pages competing for the same search.
- Reasons for other sites to mention you. Earned — sponsorships, suppliers, local press, the things you already do and get no credit for online. Not bought, ever.
- Reporting and analytics. Search Console and analytics set up so the numbers mean something, and a baseline taken before anything changes. Without that first step there is no way to tell my work from the weather.
Opinion
A position is not a result
A position is not the thing you are buying. I have watched a page hold a good one and produce almost nothing, month after month, because the page the click landed on did not answer the question that had been asked.
This is the most common way search money is wasted, and it is invisible from a rankings report, which will show you green arrows the whole time. It is also why the first thing I look at is what people typed, not where you sit.
Being found by somebody who then recognises that you are what they were looking for is the thing you are buying.
Limits
Who this is for, and who it is not
It works best where one new customer is worth enough that a handful of searches a month matters: trades, professional practices, anybody selling something people think about before they buy. And there is no agency behind me — no account manager, no junior doing the work under a senior's name, nobody to hand you off to. You are hiring the person who does it.
- Not if you want a position promised in writing. I will not put a number on a results page I do not control.
- Not if you want a pile of directory listings. A handful of real ones matter and are part of the work. Two hundred bought in a batch is a cost with no return and a mess to undo later.
- Not if you need the phone ringing this month. Local search is months, not weeks. For a hard date, paid search is the tool, and I would rather set that up than take a retainer that cannot hit it.
- Not if the site itself is the problem. Then the order is wrong — find out what is wrong first, and if the answer is the site, rebuild it. Paying monthly to work around a broken site is how the money goes missing.
Reporting
What arrives each month
- What I changed — the one change per page, named, so you can see it on your own site.
- What moved, against the baseline set at the start. Movement in the wrong direction appears too; finding that out is the point of measuring.
- What I think it means, and how sure I am. In plain language, without the dashboard.
- What I am doing next, and why. Which is the actual product.
You keep all of it, including the baseline. If you stop, or hand the work to somebody else, nothing about your own site's history leaves with me.
Evidence
Search work you can open
Structure and content, not bought links. Open them and see how each one is put together.
Distance and continuing education
distance.confederationcollege.ca (opens in a new window)
Public college, Thunder Bay
The department now has pages of its own worth promoting — mobile-friendly, searchable, discoverable — and can put up a landing page to market an upcoming course.
A site built many years ago, before the department worked the way it does now — not responsive, not accessible, and fed by hand.
More leads than they could process — the owner asked to switch ads off for some services while the team caught up. And the site's simple structure has since become the standard competitors copy.
Licensing services are bought through a Google search, and every competitor bids on the same clicks. Whether the ad spend comes back as leads is decided by the page the click lands on.
People who would have picked up the phone started making contact through the site instead — and the build has since moved off a dying stack without losing any of that.
An established provider whose site was not being found by the people already searching for what they sold.
Top positions on competitive terms, with no link building and no ongoing search spend.
The information existed but was scattered across dozens of places, so nobody could compare anything.
Questions
What people ask first
What does this cost?
The audit is from $2,500 and the ongoing work from $1,200 a month. What moves the monthly figure is how many pages need attention and how hard the searches you want are — I will tell you which end you are at before you commit to anything. You will find cheaper. What cheaper usually buys is a report a piece of software wrote and a handful of directory submissions, so the useful question to ask anyone you are comparing me against is what actually changes on your site in the first month, and who does it.
Should I hire an SEO company, an agency, or one person?
If you need five people on it at once, hire the agency — that is a real answer and I will say so. What you usually get for the money at this size, though, is a junior working through a template with a senior's name on the invoice. With me you get the senior doing the work and nowhere for the blame to go. The trade is capacity: one person's calendar, so I take a few of these at a time.
Is SEO still worth it now that Google answers everything with AI?
For questions, no — if somebody searches what AODA compliance means, Google answers it and nobody clicks anything. I have watched that happen to pages I liked. But nobody hires a contractor from an AI summary. When somebody here searches for the thing you sell they are trying to work out who to call, and that still ends in a click and a phone call. The map listings sit above all of it too, and AI has not touched those.
Is this worth doing in a market this small?
It depends entirely on what one customer is worth to you. A search that happens thirty times a month is nothing to an agency selling to Toronto and quite a lot to you, if one of those thirty signs. If one new customer is worth a few hundred dollars, this is the wrong spend and I will tell you that on the call. If one is worth four figures, the arithmetic is not close.
There are no reviews of you anywhere. Why would I trust this?
Fair, and I would rather say so than fix it with a handful of favours. What I have instead is work you can open in a browser and look at, on the work page — real sites, live, with my name nowhere on them. Judge how they are built. That is a harder thing to fake than a five-star rating, and it is the same standard I would apply to anyone quoting you.
Are you actually in Thunder Bay?
Yes — I live and work here. Most of the firms that rank for searches about this city are not: they have a page for this city and a page for forty others, written from somewhere else. That does not make them bad at the work. It does mean nobody there has walked past your building, and it means I can sit in your office.
How long before anything moves?
Technical fixes can move within weeks. Anything structural — how the site is organised, what the pages are actually about — usually takes three to six months to show clearly. A market this size is slower to read than a big one, because there is less data arriving each month to read it from.
Do you guarantee a first position?
No, and I would be careful with anyone who does. Nobody controls the results page. What I will commit to is telling you what moved, what did not, and which of the two I caused.
What happens in a month when nothing moved?
The report says so, and says what I am changing next and why. You should expect to be told that plainly rather than shown a chart arranged to imply otherwise.
Do you handle the Google Business Profile as well?
Yes, and for a local business it is often the part that pays first — the map results sit above the ordinary ones and they are won differently, on category, location and reviews rather than on pages. It is part of the work rather than an add-on.
We were told we need blog posts every week.
In a market this size, almost certainly not. There are usually a handful of pages that should exist and do not — the service you make most money from, the town you also cover, the question customers ask on every first call. Finding those four and making them genuinely good beats fifty posts competing with each other for searches nobody here is running.
Can you just fix the site instead?
Often that is the right answer, and it is cheaper. If the site itself is the problem, the honest route is a website audit first and then build work — not a monthly retainer spent working around it.
Find out where you actually stand
Send me your site and tell me what you want more of. You will get back what people here are actually typing, whether you appear for any of it, and whether this is worth your money right now — before anybody talks about a retainer.
Start with your site
Send the address and what you want more of. You will get back what I would look at first and whether this is worth doing right now.
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