Technical SEO Remediation
Canonical strategy for /products/ versus /collections/products/, robots.txt.liquid rules, parameter handling, pagination, sitemap hygiene and crawl-budget recovery.
Toronto, ON
eCommerce SEO & GEO in Toronto, ON
Ranking a GTA catalogue in three search markets at once — Canadian English, American English and Quebec French — without them cannibalising each other.
Delivered remotely for brands across Toronto and Canada.
Grow · Toronto
Why Toronto brands come to us for this
- hreflang built reciprocally across en-CA, en-US and fr-CA with x-default set on purpose, not by default
- Canadian spelling audited across titles, collections and product copy so jewellery and colour queries are reachable
- Query mining for the country-qualified searches GTA buyers actually use: ships from Canada, no duties, Canadian brand
- French collection and guide content produced as real pages rather than machine translations of the English tree
- GEO work aimed at the questions Canadian buyers ask assistants first: origin, duties, delivery time and returns
A Toronto store is competing in search markets that look similar and behave differently. On google.ca you are up against Canadian retailers and the .com results that outrank them anyway. On google.com you are a foreign store with less authority than the US brands you are trying to displace. And in Quebec you are up against French-language results that most Canadian brands never bother to produce. Treating those as one SEO project is why so many GTA stores plateau at Canadian-only visibility while their paid team spends everything acquiring Americans.
The mechanics start with hreflang, which is where almost every Canadian multi-market Shopify store is quietly broken. en-CA, en-US and fr-CA need to be declared reciprocally across every product and collection, with x-default set deliberately, or Google serves your CAD storefront to American shoppers and your English pages to Quebec. Shopify Markets can generate a lot of this, but only if the domain structure and market catalogues were configured before the content was written, which is rarely the order things happened.
Then the ordinary Shopify problems, which do not care what country you are in: products reachable at two URLs, faceted filters spawning thousands of crawlable combinations, collection pages that launch with no copy and no links into the catalogue. We fix the platform layer first, then build collection architecture around how Canadians actually search — including the spellings, because a store writing 'jewelry' and 'color' throughout is invisible to a meaningful slice of Canadian queries and looks foreign to the people who do find it.
Local context
Canadian queries carry a country in them and American ones do not
Canadian search behaviour has a tell that US search does not: buyers append the country because they have been burned. 'Ships from Canada', 'no duty', 'Canadian company', 'free shipping Canada' show up constantly in the query data of GTA stores, and they represent a shopper who has already been stung by a US brand's customs bill and is actively filtering for domestic fulfilment. That is high-intent commercial demand that almost no Toronto store builds a page for. We map it deliberately — shipping and duty explainer pages that rank, collection pages that answer the country question in the title and the copy, and structured content that makes the same fact extractable by AI answer engines, which is increasingly where the 'does this ship from Canada' question gets asked and answered before anyone reaches a search results page.
Scope
What eCommerce SEO includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Toronto brand’s realities.
Full service detailCollection & Category Architecture
A collection map built from real search demand, including sub-collections for attributes buyers search on: size, material, use case, price band, occasion.
Product Page Optimisation
Titles, descriptions, image alts, Product and Offer schema with live price and availability, plus review markup that stays valid as inventory changes.
Commercial Content Programme
Buying guides, comparisons and category explainers targeting mid-funnel demand, each linked into the collections they support. No filler blogging.
Generative Engine Optimisation
Entity and schema work, clean extractable answers, llms.txt and citation-worthy content so ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews reference your store.
Digital PR & Link Acquisition
Targeted outreach for editorial links to collection and guide pages from publications your buyers actually read. No directories, no link farms.
Scoped and quoted for your Toronto store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Toronto engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Technical Audit
A full crawl plus log-file analysis to find what Googlebot actually sees and where crawl budget is being spent. Findings ranked by revenue impact.
Demand Mapping
Keyword research mapped to your catalogue and margin, not to search volume alone. High-volume terms you cannot profitably serve get cut.
Fix the Foundation
Technical remediation ships first. There is no point building content on a site that wastes half its crawl budget on filter URLs.
Build & Publish
Collection landing pages and commercial content shipped on a fixed monthly cadence, each with internal links planned before it goes live.
Measure & Iterate
Monthly reporting on non-branded organic revenue, index coverage and AI citations. Branded queries are excluded from every growth number we show you.
Proof
eCommerce SEO results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Premium Skincare (DTC)
8-figure DTC brand, ~140 SKUs, US + CA · Shopify Plus (migrated from Magento 2)
Magento 2 cost $9k a month in hosting, extensions and emergency dev before a single feature shipped. Mobile LCP sat at 5.4 seconds and mobile converted at less than half the desktop rate across 68% of sessions. The named constraint: 11,412 indexed URLs and a top-3 organic position on their hero category, so a migration that lost rankings would cost more than the platform ever saved.
+41%mobile conversion rate1.62% to 2.28% over the first 90 days post-launch
5.4s → 1.8smobile LCP75th-percentile CrUX field data, not lab
+27%organic sessionssix months post-migration vs. pre-migration baseline, branded queries excluded
$108k/yrplatform cost removedhosting, extension licences and the standing emergency dev retainer
Outdoor & Sports Gear
~$7M/yr, 480 SKUs, US + EU via Shopify Markets · Shopify Plus (Shopify Markets, 3 regions)
Paid social carried 81% of revenue and CAC had climbed 44% in eighteen months. Organic sat at 2,100 sessions a month against category competitors doing ten times that, and the EU storefront duplicated the US catalogue with no hreflang at all. The named constraint: three national retailers own the head terms with link profiles this brand could not match in a year, so the plan had to win on query depth instead of authority.
+186%organic sessions2,100 to 6,000/mo, branded queries excluded
+21%conversion rate on organic traffic1.9% to 2.3% after the collection and PDP work landed
$61 → $45blended CACorganic share of revenue went from 8% to 24%
+38%revenue year over yearwith paid media spend down 12%
In their words
Clients on this work
+58% organic revenue YoY
“Honestly I signed for the SEO and the AI-search piece was a footnote in the proposal I skimmed. Then in March our product pages started getting quoted in ChatGPT answers for insulated growler queries, and that traffic showed up in GA4 with real purchase intent attached to it. Organic revenue is up 58% year over year and roughly a fifth of that comes from surfaces that didn't exist when we signed the contract. I still don't fully understand it. I've stopped questioning it.”
Director of MarketingOutdoor gear brand, ~$15M/yr · Seattle, WA
Verified client, 2026FAQ
eCommerce SEO in Toronto — your questions
One .com with market-level subfolders or subdomains is the stronger position for a brand whose largest market is the US, because you consolidate authority instead of splitting it. A .ca can be worth keeping where it already holds real Canadian link equity, redirected or run as a market domain. What does not work is two full duplicate stores on two TLDs competing for the same terms, which is what we most often inherit.
It depends on whether the traffic is small because the demand is small or because you have no French pages to catch it. Usually it is the second. We size it before committing: French keyword research against your actual catalogue, with volumes and competition, so the decision is a number rather than a guess. If it does not justify a content programme, we still recommend a properly translated storefront for compliance and trust.
By competing on the axis they cannot: domestic fulfilment, CAD pricing, no customs charge, and Canadian-specific content. A US giant will outrank you on the generic head term and cannot credibly own 'ships from Canada' or a Canadian sizing and returns story. Those long-tail commercial queries convert better anyway, which is why we build the collection architecture around them rather than chasing the head.
They answer country-qualified questions, which works in your favour if the facts are on your site in extractable form. When someone asks an assistant for a Canadian brand in your category, the models draw on entity data, structured content and third-party mentions. We make origin, shipping, duty treatment and returns explicit and marked up, rather than leaving them in a PDF or an image nobody can parse.
Technical fixes can move impressions inside four to six weeks. New collection pages and content typically need three to six months to rank on commercial terms. Nine months is a fair window to judge the programme on revenue. Anyone quoting thirty days is describing a fluke, not a plan.
Always. Branded queries grow when your paid media grows, so including them inflates SEO numbers for work SEO did not do. Every growth figure we report to you is non-branded, and we show the branded split separately so you can see both.
Generative engine optimisation is making your store citable by AI answer engines. It matters now for research-heavy categories where buyers ask an assistant before they search. The work overlaps heavily with good technical SEO: clean entities, correct schema, extractable answers and content worth citing.
Next step
eCommerce SEO for your Toronto brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.