About

From government websites to search.

Khalid Mohamed sitting on a rock above the ocean

Khalid Mohamed

Founder · Ottawa, Ontario

CapitalSEO is a one-person SEO and AI search practice in Ottawa. The person who writes the guides is the person who does the work.

Most of my career has been spent on Government of Canada websites. I've built and maintained sites for Statistics Canada, Justice Canada, the Canada Gazette, Environment Canada and National Defence, then spent 2015 to 2024 as a senior web developer on Government of Canada contracts. SEO was part of the work the whole way through.

Government work builds habits most SEO skips. Every page goes out in English and French, works with a screen reader, and passes validation before it goes live. At National Defence, that work grew into SEO: keyword research, competitor research and analytics for a large public site.

Why SEO is my focus now

AI changed how people search. Many now get their answer from Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity, often without clicking a link. Small businesses are being told they need a whole new kind of optimization, and a lot of what's being sold is hype.

What I've found is simpler. AI search still runs on the basics. On Google, showing up in AI answers is SEO: pages that are easy to crawl, clearly structured, and described with schema markup. That's the same careful, standards-first work I did on government sites for years. Here's how AI search picks its sources.

So SEO is now my main focus: doing that work for Ottawa–Gatineau businesses, and explaining it in plain language, with sources you can check. Structured data, accessibility, and English and French pages built to the same standard are the baseline, not extras.

History

2006Starts in tech support at Dell, then IT support at the Canada Revenue Agency.
2009Moves into web development at Statistics Canada, building bilingual, accessible pages.
2011Joins the Justice Canada web team that brought more than 40,000 pages up to federal accessibility standards.
2012Publishes the Canada Gazette online, up to three issues a week, in English and French.
2014Web developer for the Canadian Armed Forces site at National Defence. The role grows into SEO: keyword research, competitor research and analytics.
2015CapitalSEO launches and publishes its first guides, on keyword research, content marketing and analytics. The last of the original articles follows in 2016.
2015–2024Senior web developer on Government of Canada contracts, with SEO part of the work throughout.
2026SEO becomes the main focus as AI changes search. CapitalSEO relaunches as a learning site with every claim sourced, and the agency that applies it.

CapitalSEO and CapitalAI.ca

Both are owned by the same person. CapitalAI.ca helps businesses automate their workflows. CapitalSEO handles search visibility. We say so here because you should know who's behind what you read.

Contact

Email hello@capitalseo.ca, or find me on X at @CapitalSEO_ott, where I post what I check and test. Serving Ottawa, Gatineau and the National Capital Region, in English and French.

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