Eddie Nehani — Senior SEO & AEO Strategist, Toronto

I’m Eddie Nehani—a senior SEO and AEO strategist based in Toronto with over 15 years in digital marketing and 8+ years of focused, senior-level SEO experience across agency and in-house roles.
My work sits at the intersection of traditional organic search and AI search optimization. That means helping brands rank on Google—and increasingly, show up in answers generated by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Both channels matter. Both require a different approach. I work across both.
What I care most about is tying search to revenue. Not just traffic, not just rankings — but outcomes. Over the past few years, that’s looked like $3.5M in organic revenue for an iGaming brand in eight months, a $560K government contract won partly through SEO strategy for a life sciences client, and a 62% organic traffic increase with a 69% CTR improvement for an insurance client in under a year.

What I Do

I cover the full SEO/AEO stack — strategy through execution:

SEO Strategy & Architecture

Building the roadmap: topical authority planning, keyword clustering, content gap analysis, and URL/site structure designed to compound over time.

SEO Strategy & Architecture

Building the roadmap: topical authority planning, keyword clustering, content gap analysis, and URL/site structure designed to compound over time.

Content Strategy & Editorial Planning

Keyword-driven content planning, search intent alignment, content briefs, and editorial workflow — all built to serve both human readers and search engines.

Off-Page & Authority Building

Develop a backlink strategy, grow referring domains, implement digital PR, and manage brand mentions. At the last campaign I worked on, referring domains grew from ~200 to 1200+ in under six months.

AEO / AI Search Optimization

Optimizing for how brands appear in AI-generated answers — not just blue links. This means managing brand mentions on authoritative sources, building a presence in UGC platforms, applying structured data, and using the H.E.E.A.T framework to create content that LLMs trust and cite.

CRO & UX-Focused SEO

Working with product and dev teams on improving conversion rates — because traffic that doesn’t convert is just a vanity metric.

How I Think About SEO

Search isn’t a single channel—it’s what connects your entire digital presence. A well-executed SEO strategy makes your paid ads cheaper, your content more useful, your brand more trustworthy, and your product more visible on the platforms where people are actively looking for it.

I apply a framework I call H.E.E.A.T to everything I build: Helpfulness, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s an extension of Google’s E-E-A-T that puts helpfulness first. In practice, that means content that actually answers the question, backed by real experience, verified by credentials, and trusted by the platforms that matter — both search engines and AI models.

I don’t do shortcuts. No thin content, no keyword stuffing. I prefer clean fundamentals, strong content, and consistent execution over time—that’s what compounds.

AEO & AI Search

This is where most SEO practitioners are still catching up. LLMs — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude — are now here and gaining rapid popularity among users. When someone asks an AI assistant, “Who’s the best SEO consultant in Toronto?” or “What does an AEO strategist do?” the answer they get is shaped by what exists on the web: authoritative articles, reviews, forum discussions, structured data, and the quality of brand mentions across trusted sources.

Optimizing for the LLM layer requires a different playbook than traditional SEO. There’s no landing page inside an LLM. Brand presence in AI answers is built off-page—through authoritative mentions, positive sentiment, and content that models can trust. I work across both channels because the brands that win in the next five years will be the ones visible in both.

Tools I Work With Daily

Analytics & Auditing: Google Search Console, GA4, GTM, Screaming Frog, Looker Studio

Research & Strategy: Ahrefs, SEMRush, Keyword Insights, Google Keyword Planner

Content & AI Workflows: Frase, Surfer, ChatGPT, Claude, AirOps, Perplexity

AI Search Monitoring: Profound AI, manual LLM auditing across ChatGPT / Gemini / Perplexity / Claude

Development & CMS: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (SEO-relevant), WordPress, Shopify, DUDA, SquareSpace, Joomla

Project Management: ClickUp, Slack, Figma, Google Sheets

Data & Reporting: Python (scripting and automation), Looker

Education & Certifications

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — Digital Marketing Analytics Certificate
Wharton Online — Customer Analytics Certificate
Humber College — Business Communications Diploma
Academy of Fine Arts – Bachelor Degree Classical Music
Google Analytics — Advanced Certification
Google Ads — Certified
Python Essentials — Certified

A Bit More About Me

I was born on the first base. That’s my way of saying nothing was handed to me — I worked and fought for every step of my career.

I grew up in Shkodër, Albania — a city with a long tradition of artists and a famously sharp sense of humor. Both of those things stuck with me to this day. I started playing the violin at the age of seven, switched to wind instruments in 5th grade, and eventually graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with a degree in classical music, specializing in clarinet. I feel that what that education gave me, more than technique, was an understanding of what doing something consistently every day actually produces over time. Compound growth isn’t just an SEO concept.

I moved to Canada in 1997. I speak English, Spanish, Italian, and Albanian — which has occasionally been useful in client conversations and always useful in understanding that people search differently depending on how they think.

Outside of working hours, I’m usually at the gym, out with my dog Eero, or shooting with my Nikon D750. I love taking on work that leads to real outcomes for the people I work with.

How I Work

Here are a few things people always ask:

What makes a good client fit for you?
I love working with businesses with a clear mission, access to data, and leadership that values sustainable growth. I’m not the right fit for brands chasing quick wins or looking to game the algorithm.

How do you work with non-SEO stakeholders?
I communicate in plain language, have clear project specs, and have genuine collaboration. SEO shouldn’t be a black box. I’d rather teach you why something works than keep you dependent on me.

Here is a photo of the 2023 SEO IRL Toronto I attended in the Spring of 2023. I am sitting in the front row, the 4th from the far corner.

How do you handle confidentiality?
I anonymize brands in case studies, show real outcomes, and note whether work was done in-house or via an agency.