Toronto expertise for brands ready to grow.
Founded in 2014 by Martin Vassilev, Toronto SEO brings technical SEO, strategic content, and local expertise together for Canadian brands. Across 200+ engagements, our focus has stayed the same: clear priorities, accountable delivery, and visibility that supports your business goals.
Your business goals. Our search expertise.
Martin founded Toronto SEO after more than a decade leading search programs for Canadian enterprise brands and high-growth GTA businesses. He built the agency around a single principle: clients work directly with a dedicated SEO strategist who understands their business and stays accountable from planning through delivery.
His specialty is technical SEO at scale, programmatic content systems, and the increasingly critical discipline of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — earning citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Martin has personally led the SEO strategy for over 200 Toronto and GTA businesses across legal, medical, contractor, ecommerce, and SaaS verticals.
He is a frequent speaker at SearchLove Toronto, MozCon, and the Canadian Marketing Association annual conference. Martin holds the Google Analytics Individual Qualification, the Google Ads Search Certification, and is a verified Google Business Profile expert.
- Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ)
- Google Ads Search Certification
- Google Business Profile Expert (verified)
- HubSpot Inbound Certification
Enterprise experience. A personal approach.
Toronto SEO was founded in 2014 by Martin Vassilev, after a decade leading in-house and enterprise search programmes for Canadian brands. He saw an opportunity to bring that experience to businesses that wanted a clear search strategy, direct access to the people doing the work, and reporting connected to their business goals.
The agency was built around one principle: the strategist who understands your business stays accountable from discovery through delivery. That approach has guided 200+ engagements. We cap active retainers per strategist, name your strategist in the scope of work, and publish our editorial standards so you know who is responsible and what to expect.
The team works out of 1 Dundas St W in downtown Toronto, with experience across corporate law, multi-location dental and healthcare, enterprise SaaS, home services, and franchised retail. We build each strategy around the market you actually serve: Canadian search behaviour, local competition, industry requirements, and the questions your customers ask before they buy.
Today, that approach extends across Google, local search, and AI-search and Answer Engine Optimization. Our glossary, original research, and free resources library explain how we work, so you can understand our approach before deciding whether it is right for your business.
What we will and won't put our name on.
These are the editorial rules we apply to our own marketing, our client work, and our public-facing research. They are written down so clients can hold us to them.
No fabricated reviews, quotes, names, or stars.
The only review proof we publish is the verified Google Business Profile rating, deep-linked to the actual public reviews. We do not synthesise testimonial cards, AI-generate headshots, or emit Review schema for fictional reviewers — that pattern is a manual-action risk and editorially dishonest.
All currency in C$ unless otherwise marked.
Pricing, salaries, and benchmarks on this site are quoted in Canadian dollars. US-source data is converted and labelled. Mixing currencies without disclosure is sloppy at best, deceptive at worst.
Stats are sourced or framed as portfolio observation.
Every quantitative claim either links to a primary source, comes from our own verifiable original research, or is explicitly framed as 'in our Toronto SEO portfolio observation' so readers can weigh it appropriately. We do not invent statistics.
Author bylines are real and consistent.
Every article on this site that bears an author byline links to a real person with a real LinkedIn, real credentials, and a stable Person @id used across every other piece by the same author. We do not use 'Editorial team' or generic bylines to obscure authorship.
AI assistance is disclosed where material.
Our research, glossary, and reference content is human-authored and human-reviewed. Where AI tooling materially assists — e.g. structured-data generation, large-scale linting — we say so. We do not pretend bulk AI content is hand-written.
Sponsorships, affiliates, and conflicts are disclosed.
If we recommend a tool, platform, or vendor, we disclose any sponsorship, affiliate relationship, or commercial interest at the point of the recommendation. We will not silently route readers to commercial partners.
How we work, in four lines.
Clarity at every step
Know what we are working on, why it matters, and how progress is measured. Clear deliverables and transparent reporting keep you informed.
Business-focused strategy
We connect search performance to the outcomes that matter to you: qualified leads, booked calls, and pipeline.
Strong search foundations
Technical SEO, structured data, site speed, and crawlability give your content a stronger foundation for discovery.
Accountable delivery
Work directly with the strategist who understands your business and stays responsible for your campaign from planning through delivery.
Keep reading
Talk to the founder, not a sales rep.
Martin scopes every engagement personally. First contact gets you a written audit of your current SEO state in three business days — pricing, opportunities, and honest red flags included. No pitch deck, no obligation.
A few things our agency has measured
Findings from our internal 2025–2026 client audits and test sets. Methods and hedges shown for every claim.
Removing weak content lifted LLM citation rates more than adding new content during the first 90 days of an engagement, in three out of four engagements we measured.
Across four 2025–2026 client engagements, we tracked share of voice across an 80-query basket before and after a 90-day push. In three engagements, the negative-reduction phase (deindexing or merging the bottom 15% of URLs) accounted for the larger share of the lift.
Adding a real author byline with a link to a bio page increased perceived-authority signals across LLM probes.
On 12 service pages where we added a named-author byline plus a Person JSON-LD entry, citation appearances grew over the following 8 weeks. Pages without bylines on the same domain did not show the same lift over the same period.
Removing pronoun-led sentence openings lifted LLM citation probability on our test set by a measurable margin.
We rewrote 14 high-traffic agency pages to replace 'It usually takes…' style openings with explicit subjects ('Local SEO results usually appear…'). Citation rate across a 30-query basket on ChatGPT and Perplexity rose by roughly 18 percentage points over six weeks.
Methodology: /methodology. Underlying queries and methods available on request.