Toronto has one of the most crowded agency markets in North America, and almost all of it is general. Very few agencies here work only on online stores, which is the entire reason RankMyStore exists.
Search for an SEO agency in Toronto and you will find hundreds of results, most offering the same list of services to every kind of business. Dentists, lawyers, contractors, software firms and stores all get the same process.
A store is not those things. The work happens in a product catalogue, the money is on collection and product pages, and the technical problems are ones a service business never encounters.
How Should a Toronto Store Choose Between Agencies?
Ask four questions that most agencies answer badly, and judge on the answers rather than on the case studies.
We publish our own answers to all four on this site, which you can check before you contact us. The pricing, the process and the refusals are all written down.
FOUR QUESTIONS WORTH ASKING
- What share of your clients are online stores. If it is under half, your account will be run using methods developed for other kinds of business.
- What will you do to my collection pages in the first ninety days. A vague answer here means they have not thought about the pages that carry your revenue.
- How will you measure this. If the answer is traffic and rankings without revenue, you will not be able to tell whether it worked.
- What will you not do. Every honest agency has things they refuse to sell. An agency that says yes to everything is describing a sales process, not a method.
What Kinds of Stores Do You Work With in the GTA?
Direct to consumer brands, retailers with wide catalogues, and businesses that sold wholesale for years and have recently started selling to the public.
The Greater Toronto Area has an unusual mix. There is a large concentration of importers and distributors in the north and west, a growing set of consumer brands in the city itself, and a steady flow of established businesses moving online for the first time.
Each has a different starting problem. New consumer brands usually need authority and content, because their sites are fine and nobody knows they exist. Long established businesses usually need technical and structural work, because their catalogues were built for a different purpose. Retailers with wide ranges usually need collection page work above everything else.
The first thing we do is work out which of the three you are, because starting in the wrong place wastes a quarter.
Do You Have to Be in Toronto to Work With You?
No. We are in Toronto, most clients are elsewhere in the GTA or further afield, and almost all the work is done remotely regardless.
Being nearby is convenient occasionally and unnecessary most of the time. Meetings happen by video, the work happens in your store admin, and the reporting arrives by email.
Where being local does help is at the start. An initial session in person, with everyone who has an opinion in the room, tends to settle things faster than several rounds of email. After that it rarely matters.
For clients outside the region we run the same engagement without the in person part, and it works exactly as well.
How Long Does It Take to Get Results in a Competitive Market?
Longer than the industry usually admits. Expect three to four months before anything meaningful moves, six to nine months before a category is producing reliably, and a full year before compounding is visible.
In a less competitive market these timelines compress. In Toronto, where many categories have well funded stores that have been investing in search for years, they do not.
The first three months are almost entirely preparation. Fixing access, recording the baseline, rebuilding the first set of pages. It looks like nothing is happening, and for a while nothing is, in the sense that the numbers have not moved yet.
Months four to nine are where the first category should start producing. If it does not, that is real information and it should change the plan rather than be explained away.
The second year is different in kind. A store with authority, covered categories and consistent brand mentions moves faster on everything new it does. That is the payoff, and it is why the decision to start is really a decision about whether you will still be doing this in eighteen months.
What Does Competing in the Toronto Market Actually Take?
More patience than a smaller market, because your competitors are well funded and have been at this for years. It also takes a narrower target, since trying to win everything at once wins nothing.
In a competitive market the winning approach is almost always to take a smaller area completely rather than a large area partially. One product category, fully covered, with the collection page, the guides, the comparisons and the answers all in place, will outperform shallow work spread across ten categories.
Once one category is working, the same pattern moves to the next, and the second one is faster because the store has more authority than it did.
This is slower to start and much faster to compound. It is also the approach most likely to be abandoned halfway by a store that expected results everywhere in month two, which is why we set the expectation before starting rather than after.