How long does SEO take to show results?

It depends on the site, the competition and how fast the fixes ship. Google's SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others can take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped. We report against a baseline recorded before the work starts.

Do you do link-building?

Yes — but only earned and digital-PR-style placements. No PBNs, no comment spam, no marketplaces.

Can you work with my existing site, or do I need to rebuild?

Most of the time we work with what you have. We rebuild when the current CMS makes basic SEO impossible — for example, a Wix or older Shopify theme that can't render server-side or set canonical tags.

Do you work with small businesses in Ottawa?

Yes. The studio is at 208 Booth Street, Ottawa, and our documented local work includes Cookiddoo and KIDSUP in Kanata. For a small business the first pass is usually the Google Business Profile, consistent listings, a technical check and the service pages that match what people search. It starts with a 30-minute strategy session for €100.

Do you do SEO in French?

Yes. French pages are written in French by people who work in it, with their own URLs, titles and descriptions, and hreflang tags that pair each page with its English version. For an Ottawa business that serves Gatineau or Quebec, the French pages are planned from French search queries.

Do you handle multi-language SEO?

Yes. Hreflang, locale-correct content, and search-engine submission per market. We're currently running campaigns in English, French, German, Russian, and Ukrainian.

SEO services in Ottawa: technical and local SEO

What SEO promotion means here

SEO promotion, as we run it, is the work that makes a site earn qualified search traffic and keeps it earning after the next core update: technical fixes the crawler can act on, content that answers a real commercial question, links you earned, and the structure that gets you quoted inside AI answers. It is measured against revenue, and the reporting says so.

Local SEO for Ottawa businesses

Google describes local results as based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence (Google Business Profile Help). Distance is outside your control. Relevance and prominence come from work we can do:

Google Business Profile. Primary and secondary categories, services, hours, photos and the service area, kept identical to the website.
Name, address and phone consistency. The same details on the website, in directories and in industry listings, so every source describes one business.
Bilingual pages with hreflang. English and French versions of each service page, each written for its own search queries and linked to its pair.
Local landing pages. Pages for the parts of Ottawa–Gatineau you serve, with local detail a visitor can check.
Reviews. A request after each completed job and a reply to every review.

Our guides cover the same ground in more depth: the local SEO guide and Google Maps optimization. The Ottawa office and the local cases are on the Ottawa marketing agency page.

Technical SEO audit

The audit checks what stops a search engine from crawling, rendering and indexing the pages that sell: status codes and redirects, canonical tags, sitemaps, robots rules, page speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, internal links, duplicate pages and hreflang. Each finding comes with the URL, the fix and its priority. The method is written up in our technical SEO audit guide.

What good SEO looks like in 2026

The 2018 routine of one 2,000-word post per keyword plus five backlinks is too thin for search in 2026. What works today:

Technical excellence. Core Web Vitals in the green, valid structured data, crawlable JS, server-rendered pages with edge caching.
Topical authority. Pillar pages plus full clusters of supporting content. One deep page that answers a real question beats fifty shallow ones.
Real-world signals. Citations from publications your customers read, branded search volume, time-on-page from logged-in users.
AI-readability. Your content has to earn a citation inside an LLM answer as well as a Google ranking. We cover this in detail under AI SEO & GEO agency: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews.

Our process

1. Audit

A technical, content, and competitor audit run by the senior who stays on your account afterwards. Output: a prioritized punch list with effort estimates against it.

2. Strategy

Channel mix, keyword universe, content calendar, and the success metrics we'll be measured against. Reviewed with you. Adjusted quarterly.

3. Technical fix-up

Site speed, indexing, schema, internal linking, canonical hygiene, hreflang. Whatever the audit surfaced, in priority order, with before/after evidence.

4. Content production

Semantic, intent-mapped, and written by humans with subject knowledge. AI sits in the loop for research, outlining, and translation; every draft still goes through a senior editor before it ships.

5. Off-page

Digital PR, partnerships, owned distribution. We do not buy links.

6. Measurement

Search Console, GA4, server logs, AI mention tracking, and a weekly Looker Studio dashboard that pulls it all together.

What we don't do

Guarantee rankings. (No honest agency does.)
Sell you a 10,000-keyword "report" with no priorities.
Lock you into long contracts. Month-to-month after the first three months.
Outsource the actual work to whoever bids lowest on Fiverr.

Pricing

Start with a 30-minute marketing strategy session for €100: we look at your situation and agree on the next step. Everything after that is quoted for your scope. How it works: Pricing.

The next step

Send us the domain and the two or three queries you want to own. You get back the technical punch list, the queries you already rank 8–30 for, and what a realistic first quarter looks like — in writing, before any proposal exists.

Book a 30-minute strategy session for €100. Direct line +1 613 867 7767, info@mmix.biz.

Sector playbooks: SEO for tour operators and travel companies, marketing for moving companies and law firm websites. If you want to run the first pass yourself before booking anything, work through SEO checklist for small business websites.

Written by Maksym Stepanenko, founder of Marketing MIX. Last reviewed: 2026-09-01.