SEO in Ottawa, run by the people who change the code

We are not going to show you a chart of somebody else's traffic. We do not have analytics access to our clients' marketing dashboards, and the percentage-uplift graphs that fill most Ottawa SEO pages are correlation sold as cause. What we can publish, in full, is an audit of nanushi.org itself — every finding, including the embarrassing ones.

In August 2026 this site had gone sixteen months with effectively no search traffic. That looks exactly like a content problem, and it was not one. Our sitemap was publishing 24 URLs that the router did not serve: tutorial chapters were filed as 01-introduction.md, the route keyed them as introduction, and the sitemap advertised the filename. All 24 returned HTTP 200 while rendering “Not Found”. That single bug generated the duplicate-title, duplicate-description, multiple-H1 and canonical-outside-head clusters our crawl reported, all at once — four findings, one cause.

In the same pass we found that the sitemap had never been submitted to Search Console in the property's entire lifetime, that the homepage declared no canonical at all, that our structured data pointed logo and image at a file that returned 404, that no page had an OpenGraph image, and — the one most relevant here — that /ottawa, our own local landing page, was missing from the sitemap entirely.

Ruled out and explicitly not the problem: speed, internal linking, backlinks, mobile, robots.txt, domain age. Every one of those is something an agency could have sold us a retainer to improve, and none of them would have moved anything.

That is the same method we would run on your site, and the writeups are linked further down this page so you can judge the work before paying for any of it.

Ottawa agencies advertise monthly retainers that generally start somewhere near $800 and run past $2,500, and a good number publish nothing at all and route you to a strategy call. Both approaches have the same problem: the price is set before anyone has looked at your site.

We quote after reading your Search Console data, because the two most common situations need completely different amounts of money. A site with a broken sitemap or a canonical problem needs a defined piece of engineering work and then almost nothing ongoing — that is a fixed-scope job with an end date. A site that is technically clean but has 60-word service pages needs writing, every month, for a long time. Selling both as the same retainer is how businesses end up subscribed to something that stopped doing anything in month three.

For reference, our published Ottawa web development ranges start around $1,500–$3,000 for a marketing site, and SEO built into a build we are doing is not a separate line item — per-page canonicals, a sitemap generated from the same source the router uses, structured data whose assets resolve, and Search Console connected before launch rather than six months after.

Three things we do not do: long lock-in contracts, ranking guarantees, and bundling a “free website” into a twelve-month commitment. The free site is not free; it is financed by the twelve months, and it is very hard to leave.