We build growth engines for ambitious Canadian brands.
Founded in 2014 by Martin Vassilev on a single bet: SEO is an engineering discipline, not a content-mill subscription. Twelve years and 200+ engagements later, the bet still pays. Senior-led on every account — by design, not by promise.
Senior SEO strategy — built on data, run by the founder.
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: every account is run by a senior strategist — never handed off to a junior account manager working from a process document.
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
- MBA, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
- BCom (Marketing), Schulich School of Business, York University
- SearchLove Toronto 2024 — "AEO is the new SEO"
- MozCon 2023 — "Programmatic SEO for Canadian markets"
- Canadian Marketing Association 2024 — keynote on local search
- BrightonSEO 2023 — guest panel on Map Pack ranking factors
- Search Engine Land — quarterly columnist on Canadian SEO
- Toronto Star — quoted on Google algorithm changes (2023, 2024)
- The Globe and Mail — quoted on small-business digital strategy (2024)
- Marketing News Canada — bylined contributor
From enterprise floors to the founder-led model.
Toronto SEO was founded in 2014 by Martin Vassilev, after a decade leading in-house and enterprise search programmes for Canadian brands. The pattern that pushed him to start the firm was the same pattern at every account size: ambitious operators being sold rented dashboards, recycled playbooks, and content nobody read — while the agencies pocketed the retainer and rotated the work to whichever junior was free that quarter.
The agency was built around one principle: every account is run by a senior strategist from intake through delivery — never handed off to a pod, an offshore writer, or a junior with a checklist. That principle has held for twelve years and 200+ engagements. The discipline that protects it is structural, not aspirational: we cap active retainers per strategist, we put senior names on the SOW, and we publish our editorial standards so clients have something concrete to hold us to.
The team works out of 1 Dundas St W in downtown Toronto — close enough to most GTA clients to walk in for a working session. We've shipped against the markets that punish lazy SEO hardest: corporate law, multi-location dental and healthcare, enterprise SaaS, premium home services, and franchised retail. The shared lesson across all of them: copy-paste US tactics quietly underdeliver in Canada because the SERP, the citation graph, and the buyer journey are different — and the agency that doesn't notice will keep billing you anyway.
The same founder-led model now runs our AI-search and Answer Engine Optimization practice. The methodology is the moat, and the methodology is open: the glossary, the original research, and the free resources library publish exactly how we work — so a prospect knows what they're buying before they sign anything.
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.
Transparency first
Every retainer dollar is traceable to a deliverable. The math is in the report. No black boxes, no "trust us, it's working."
Revenue-focused
Rankings are an input. We report on qualified leads, booked calls, and pipeline — the only metrics that pay payroll.
Technical excellence
Schema graphs, crawl budgets, Core Web Vitals, render paths. The unglamorous work most agencies politely ignore is the work that decides whether content ranks.
Senior execution
The strategist who scopes your account is the strategist who runs it — for the life of the engagement. No pod handoffs, ever.
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.