SEO for Canada

Read in Semrush’s Canada database on 27 September 2026. Difficulty is scored inside that one database only.

Semrush puts Toronto’s requirement at 91 referring domains — the highest figure it gave us for any term in any of the four markets.

Toronto measures 58% difficulty. Vancouver measures 38%. Twenty points apart, in the same country, on the same phrasing of the same service.

Toronto is the hardest single geographic term we measured anywhere — harder than New York at 50%, harder than London at 49%, harder than the British national term at 53%. It is also a smaller market than any of them. Vancouver, at 38%, sits in the same band as Chicago and Miami.

Anyone planning Canadian search work as a single country programme is averaging two markets that behave nothing alike. The national term at 36% is, unusually, easier than its biggest city — the reverse of the pattern in the United Kingdom and Australia.

The comparison that made us look twice: on the plain head term, “seo agency” measures 6,600 searches a month at 43% difficulty in Canada, against 60,500 at 41% in the United States.

A ninth of the American volume and measurably harder to rank in. Difficulty reflects how firmly established sites hold the results page, not how many people search — and a smaller market with a mature agency sector and few new challengers can be more closed than a large one. “We will start somewhere smaller” is not a strategy until somewhere smaller has been checked.

Canadian traffic is also among the cheapest measured: $4.81 a click in Vancouver and $6.40 on the white-label term, against $18–22 for the equivalent Australian and American terms. Lower difficulty on some terms, lower value on most.

We have no Canadian office and this page will not imply one. Work is delivered from Ahmedabad, and Canada is the hardest of the four markets for time-zone overlap — worth settling at scoping rather than discovering in week three.

On the measurement, the honest advice for a Canadian engagement is to start with Vancouver or with a service-specific term such as Shopify SEO at 23%, and to treat Toronto as a multi-year objective that needs a real link-building programme behind it. We would rather say that at the start than bill for a year of effort against a 91-domain requirement.