Marketing for Ottawa trades, planned for a city that searches in two languages

Why Ottawa needs its own plan

Ottawa is big and spread out, which makes the service radius the first decision. The City of Ottawa is divided into 24 wards, and the 2021 Census counted 1,017,449 residents spread from the ByWard Market out past Carp and Metcalfe. A crew based in Stittsville can lose most of a morning reaching a call in Cumberland.

Google sorts local results partly by distance from the searcher, alongside relevance and prominence. So trying to rank "everywhere in Ottawa" usually means ranking well nowhere. The better goal is to own a cluster of wards your trucks can reach, then add more once the first cluster is profitable. Our areas page walks through all 24 wards and what each one tends to mean for marketing.

Two languages, measured separately

Bilingual marketing only pays when you can see what each language brings in. In the 2021 Census, 36.4% of Ottawa residents could hold a conversation in both English and French, and 14.1% listed French as their first official language. Those customers are not spread evenly; they matter more to a company working Orléans or Vanier than to one working Kanata South.

Here's how we handle it:

• Separate campaigns, not mixed ones. English and French searches go into their own ad groups with their own landing pages, so the cost per lead for each language is visible.
• Professional French copy. We write the brief, the keyword list and the page structure. We recommend you engage a professional French copywriter or a certified translator for the words themselves, because a machine-translated furnace ad reads badly to the very people you want to impress.
• A French phone answer plan. If nobody on your team can take a call in French, we'll say so plainly and design the campaign around a callback promise rather than pretending.

The full approach is on the bilingual campaigns page.

What we do, and what we never do

We plan and run marketing for trades businesses and advise owners on pricing, positioning and where to grow. We are not a contractor: we don't hold tools, take jobs, dispatch technicians or sell your leads to anyone else.

Our five services, each explained on the services hub:

1. Bilingual English/French campaigns with separate tracking.
2. Local SEO across Ottawa's wards for map and organic results.
3. Google Ads with a cost ceiling set from your own job numbers.
4. Ottawa–Gatineau cross-river marketing, including when not to bother.
5. Bilingual trade websites that load fast and make calling easy.

A two-minute sum for any Ottawa owner

Before you spend a dollar, work out what a lead is worth to you. Use your own numbers in place of these.

If a French campaign in Orléans brings leads at $110 and an English campaign aimed at the downtown core costs $210 a lead, the French campaign is the better use of money for that business, even though it reaches fewer people. Our guide on choosing your Ottawa service area runs the same arithmetic ward by ward.

Proof, read honestly

The case studies we publish are results from our HVAC work, which is where the group's portfolio started; Ali Sedighi has built more than 150 live HVAC websites. CombiBoiler.ca reached 300% ROI with more than 300 leads a month, and BCWide.ca tripled its leads in 90 days. Those are heating results, not plumbing or roofing results. What carries over to other trades is the method: tight targeting, honest tracking and pages written for the person actually calling. See the results page for what each case shows.

Who is behind Ottawa.Marketing

Ottawa.Marketing is part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group, a Canadian group of companies headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and part of its Trades.Agency family. It is led by Ali Sedighi, MBA, whose digital marketing work began in 2007. Read more on the about page, or check plans and pricing.

Being run from Vancouver matters less than it sounds: the work happens in Google, in ad accounts and on your website, and every recommendation is checked against what Ottawa searchers actually see in the wards you serve. Call, text or email with your trade, your wards and what isn't working, and you'll get a straight answer, including "don't spend on this yet" when that's the honest one.