Small business SEO solutions that deliver big results

Our SEO services focus on getting you noticed in the places that matter

Kudos to you. You’re likely on this page because you realize the importance of SEO to your business. You’re completely correct. Ensuring your website ranks well on Google is the single most important thing you can do when it comes to marketing your business.

Businesses who appear on the first page of Google (and in the prestigious number one position) for high volume search terms for a product of service have a huge advantage over their competition.

Say you’re a dentist in Vancouver. The term “dentist Vancouver” gets close to 10,000 searches a month. On average, 31% of clicks on Google go to the website in first position

If you’ve done the math, you’ll know that if you’re in the first position on Google for “dentist Vancouver”, you can expect a steady stream of 3,000 users (that’s 3,000 potential customers) to your website every month.

Over the years, we’ve created and refined…and refined…and then refined some more, a highly-effective methodology in getting companies to the top of Google. It takes persistence, pain-staking attention to detail, and an ability to think outside-the-box.

Our approach has achieved remarkable results for company’s large and small. In fact, we’ve helped transform businesses entirely off the back of improvements in their rankings on Google.

When you work with Ocean Bear Digital, you’ll receive a cutting-edge, personalized SEO strategy. This strategy will be tailored to the circumstances of your business, the industry you operate, in and executed on by a highly experienced, technical SEO marketer; and all at a fraction of the cost of large-scale agencies.

Why we’re the top SEO for small business

Proven performance

56 first position rankings for one client; 1,200% increase in Google visibility for another.

SEO Expertise

No cutting corners. Ethical SEO techniques that Google love and reward.

Exhaustive keyword research

We’ll leave no stone unturned in identifying the keywords that will drive traffic to your website.

Creative link-building

A diverse portfolio of link building techniques to build your website’s authority and move you up the rankings.

Content that engages

We’ll power your blog with content ideas that attract links to your website like bees to honey.

Local SEO

Our experience in Google MyBusiness and local SEO will boost your visibility in Google’s snack pack and Google Maps.

Transparency

Detailed reporting every step of the way, using the most advanced analytics tools on the market.

Website expertise

Advanced technical and on-page optimization, ensuring your website is performing at its peak.

Check out our SEO pricing plans, designed to deliver big results for small businesses

SEO Pricing Plans

A sneak peek at our tried-and-tested small business SEO process

As part of our upfront SEO audit, we’ll conduct a comprehensive technical review of your website and present you with the results, alongside a series of recommendations. There are literally hundreds of on-page technical factors which can impact SEO. Some of the most important are site speed, security, crawlability (the ability of your website to be crawled by Googlebots), broken internal or external links, and correct use of hreflang tags (particularly if you have a multilingual website).

We’ll also review the health of your on-page SEO, alongside recommendations. This is with the view of optimizing your website structure, including meta and HTML tags; proper interlinking between pages; as well as ensuring your content length is up to scratch.

Lastly, we’ll review your website from a user experience perspective. If users aren’t engaging with your website, Google will assume it either isn’t relevant to the user’s search query, or provides a low-quality experience, and they’ll punish you as a result.

Also, improving your website user experience will ultimately increase the amount of users who enquire or purchase.

If your website requires significant work to update, a more cost-effective solution may be to build a new website, which will be natively developed with SEO in mind. Our sister agency can develop a beautiful, fast and SEO-optimized website.

We’ll identify the keywords you need to target using the most advanced keyword analytics tools on the market.

Keyword research isn’t just about identifying the keywords with the highest search volume, especially as they’re likely to be the most competitive keywords and will take the most amount of time to rank well for. There are other important elements of keyword research, including:

Thematic groups of keywords.
For example, through our keyword research for a debt collection agency, we identified a large amount of searches relating to debt collection for small business. This was a niche many of this company’s competitors weren’t targeting, and so we built a strategy around ranking for small business debt collection keywords. The graph below demonstrates the improvements this company has made relative to their closest competitor across keywords that include “small business” and “debt collection”.

Longtail search terms.
Longtail keywords are…you guessed it, searches on Google that are longer in nature. They’re often a better indicator of commercial intent and are typically less competitive. For example, one of our clients is a leadership coach. The search term “leadership development” has over 1,000 searches a month, however a ranking difficulty of 75%, indicating it may take some time to break onto the first page of Google (that’s our goal, though). There are hundreds of longtail keywords however that will be easier to rank for sooner, and which also display greater commercial intent, such as “coaching and mentoring for leadership development”. This has 50 searches a month but a ranking difficulty under 50%.

Competitor gap analysis.
Often the most enjoyable type of keyword research! We’ll analyze your competitors and look at the search terms driving traffic to their website, as well as the search terms they’re blissfully overlooking.

Having identified the perfect keywords, it’s then time for us to start seeding them onto your website.

This is an artform that involves seeding the right keywords, the right amount of times, in the right places. It’s about developing thematic pages, matched to the thematic keywords described in the keyword research section: it’s about seeding keywords into the first places Google check to understand the subject matter of your website, such as HTML header tags and the first 100 words of your pages: and it’s about lots, lots more.

We’ll also delve into advanced techniques, including Schema to display your website in Featured Snippets, which are interactive elements that display at the top of Google. Featured Snippets can enjoy a click through rate of up to 20%, making them a prized scalp on Google. Below was a Featured Snippet we attained for a business who sell and finance bar equipment. 15% of users who search “bar concepts” on Google now click on this interactive element.

Local SEO
Because of the volume of Google searches that contain “near me”, or append a location after the query, such as “mobile mechanic Vancouver”, we optimize all our clients for local SEO, regardless of their size. This approach is twofold:

Building out location-based pages. For example, if you’re tax advisor in Vancouver, we may look to build pages out such as tomdoestax.ca/tax-advisor-vancouver and tomdoestax.ca/tax-advisor-victoria. Or, if you’re an ecommerce provider that ships nationwide, we may build out dedicated location-based product pages, such as: cathammocks.ca/hammocks-calgary and cathammocks.ca/hammocks-toronto.
It may not be your own website, but Google MyBusiness is your home away from home. Optimising your Google My Business location can help your business feature strongly in local business listings, including Google Snack Pack and Google Maps app.

Industry-leading, thought leadership content is an important factor in your ability to rank well on Google. It enables you to incorporate additional keywords onto your website and builds engagement. The longer you can keep users on your website and the more engaged they are, the more Google will trust that your website is relevant to the keywords you’ve seeded into your pages.

Even more importantly however; useful, original content will attract links to your website. Google perceives inbound links from other trustworthy and reputable websites as a vote of confidence for your website, and will move you up the rankings accordingly. In fact, building links is the single most important factor contributing to how well you rank on Google. We’ll get to that in more detail in the next stage of our SEO process for small business.

An SEO retainer with Ocean Bear Digital includes an allowance for content development. This includes identifying the right topics, based on Google search volume, and a content gap analysis. A content gap analysis is where we’ll identify what topics will be easier to rank for based on the content that currently exists (or rather, doesn’t exist!), and what content we can make better. This can include capitalizing on trending or seasonal search terms.

Lastly, it includes all the on-page optimization. Making your content beautiful is an important step to ensuring the high engagement referred to above. Plus, we’ll include subtle links back to your product pages to ensure these pages benefit from any of the authority your content generates.

Where to begin with link-building, the cornerstone of your march up Google’s rankings. Attaining relevant, high-quality links takes hard-work, persistence and creativity. The reward in achieving these links however is significant, with Google using it as their foremost tool in determining the quality of a website, and its position in their search engine.

As an example, Google deems www.cbc.ca a highly authoritative website as a result of the volume of website visitors the site receives, and the over 250,000 websites linking to it. If CBC then links to your website, by proxy you’ll receive some of that authority, positively impacting your ranking on Google. By contrast, if a virtually unknown website links to your website, it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in your rankings. Quality over quantity.

There are multiple ways to build links, including broken link building, guest posting, outreach to industry associations, suppliers, community groups, and partners; reviewing competitor backlinks to identify opportunities; and lots more. By far the most popular, sustainable and fruitful approach is by crafting earth-shatteringly good content, and then conducting outreach to relevant industry sources to acquire links to that content. This takes time and effort, but can yield amazing results for your brand on Google.

Ocean Bear Digital are experienced link builders with a tried-and-test, continually refined methodology that delivers results.

Reporting, testing and adjusting

While this gives some idea as to the SEO process we follow, it’s anything but linear. We adopt an agile approach based on hard data, and using the most advanced analytics tools on the market. Our reporting includes:

Overall visibility on Google across a select group of high-value keywords
Fluctuations in ranking performance against the keywords we’re tracking in your account
Your volume of website traffic resulting from Organic Search
Identification of trending keywords so we can attempt to rank for these before any of your competitors do
Conversions from Organic Search (to ensure the keywords you rank well on correlate with commercial intent)
Google My Business performance (calls, request for directions, web visits)
Total impressions (number of times your website has been seen in Google) and clicks. This helps us understand click through rate for various keywords.
New and lost backlinks, including for competitors
Website health and performance, so we can immediately identify technical issues impacting ranking performance

SEO results that move the needle

First position rankings

Increase in Google visibility

Leads from Organic Search per month

On-page technical SEO health

Companies we’ve worked with

Ocean Bear Digital has worked alongside us to build our short and long term digital strategy. They successfully combine the science of SEO and analytics to deliver commercial results and major ROI. It’s big brand thinking and strategy without the pretense and budget. They took the time to understand our business model, brand, market and competitors, educated us and worked with us to define our goals and used this to create a way forward. After a few short weeks, it is already delivering tangible outcomes and building our business online. We are so incredibly grateful to have Ocean Bear Digital as a partner in our business.

Peta Karunaratne

The Karuna Collective

Jamie is a talented digital consultant and has been a great asset to Hastings Deering and the Caterpillar brand. Jamie has helped us develop and execute comprehensive and robust integrated digital marketing strategies that have had a significant impact on the mining arm of the Hastings Deering business. His technical ability and knowledge in digital has helped us drive significant digital innovation and disruption at the company. He is a subject matter expert in marketing automation – particularly business to business – and of course, all things Google. Highly recommended!

Katie O’Malley

Hastings Deering

We were in a tricky spot and didn’t know where to turn. We didn’t rank on anything except our own brand name on Google (and even then we weren’t in first position). Working with Ocean Bear Digital, we now rank strongly across most industry search terms. Our traffic has gone up and we get a steady stream of enquiries. We’ve found Jamie super pleasant to work with. Importantly, he took the time to learn about our industry and business to deliver the best outcomes. He explained his process in a way we could understand and is very responsive.

Dan Downs

Better Credit Management

Say hello

Your march to the top starts here. Get in touch about our best-in-class SEO solutions. We’re friendly, responsive, and masters of our craft in getting you noticed on Google.

You don’t get this far without a few questions

Search engine optimization is a complex world, with no formal certifications offered and a laundry list of techniques that Google will punish you for. It’s very hard to know then what the right thing to do is, and will be effective. It’s important to work with agencies who provide ethical SEO services day-in, day-out as they know what is effective in building visibility for your website, and what Google will reward, not punish you for. We’ve provided SEO services to a range of companies ranging from large multi-nationals, down to local small businesses. The benefits of our SEO services include traffic to your website, leads, purchases and ultimately, revenue and profit.

It really depends on what services are included. Services that include writing content (for blogs and articles), end-to-end management of link-building and all of the on-site optimization through your website’s CMS will invariably cost more than purely consultative SEO services, which aims to provide recommendations without doing as much of the ‘hands on’. Generally, small businesses in Canada can expect to pay $2,000 to $5,000 a month for SEO services.

You can view our small business SEO prices to see how competitive we are.

SEO is one of the most important things you can do as a small business, and is the most scalable way to build your website and brand over time. Imagine you’re a dentist in Vancouver. The search term “dentist Vancouver” gets close to 10,000 searches a month. On average, 31% of clicks on Google go to the website in first place. So, if you’re in first place on Google for “dentist Vancouver”, you can expect a steady stream of 3,000 users (and 3,000 potential customers) to your website every month. SEO costs money but you can’t put a price on the lasting benefits to your business.

Tragically, the days of Yellow Pages are over. The fact is, almost all consumers search for products or services on Google. It is the one marketplace that is make or break for your business. Ranking strongly on Google is critical, with less than 1% of users who search a product or service clicking on a link outside the first page (top 10 results). Q: How long will it take me to improve my ranking? A: SEO is the best way to scale your website and business in the long-term. Like all good things though, it doesn’t come quick or easy. It will generally take at least three months to start seeing positive swings in keywords and organic traffic. We generally like to work off a full 12-month cycle to see the full impact of our SEO services. If your business is seeking a more immediate solution, we generally recommend running Google Ads, which can provide you with immediate leads while in the early stages of SEO.

SEO is the best way to scale your website and business in the long-term. Like all good things though, it doesn’t come quick or easy. It will generally take at least three months to start seeing positive swings in keywords and organic traffic. We generally like to work off a full 12-month cycle to see the full impact of our SEO services. If your business is seeking a more immediate solution, we generally recommend running Google Ads, which can provide you with immediate leads while in the early stages of SEO.