Ambassador Customs — redesign, SEO and custom plugins for a Canadian customs broker

Project overview

Ambassador Customs Brokerage is a licensed Canadian customs broker based in Ottawa. It clears imports for businesses and individuals at every port of entry in the country: CBSA submissions, CARM registration and RPP bonds, HS classification and flat brokerage fees.

When I started, the site was working against them. My March 2026 audit found problems that could get it penalized or simply ignored by Google. One article repeated its key phrase 15–17 times, and titles read like clickbait (“7 Explosive Reasons…”, “Save Up To 30% Today!”). The header and footer linked to different URLs, some links leaked to a second .com domain, and the CARM guide existed twice. There was no structured data at all, and every missing URL was redirected to the home page. The design also looked dated for a business whose whole pitch is authority.

My role in the project

I lead the project end to end, from the audit through design and development to content, and since August the site has been on my monthly SEO support. The areas I owned and delivered directly:

• The SEO audit in March, a four-month plan for April–July, a follow-up audit in June that checked the plan against what was actually live, and a final push in July
• The redesign: three concepts for the landing page, then the chosen direction built into the live site
• Two custom WordPress plugins: a blog-grid widget for Elementor and an SEO-fixes plugin
• Content: six regional pages, two niche service pages and new articles, each with metadata, FAQ and internal links
• Technical SEO: titles, structured data, redirects and Search Console

What I built: the redesign

• Three directions for one landing page, with identical copy and section order. Diplomatic used Cormorant Garamond in navy and gold, the register of a private bank. Operations used Plus Jakarta Sans with JetBrains Mono on a modular grid, like a logistics console. Editorial used Newsreader, laid out in chapters like a premium magazine
• The client chose Operations, which became the live design: numbered sections, services as four “lanes”, ports as numbered cards, mono-type labels and gold-on-navy accents
• The home page: a nationwide hero, a trust strip, services by lane, importers across Canada, why us, a start-your-import block with account setup and a quote request, a 16-question FAQ with search and a ⌘K shortcut, real Google reviews and a closing call to action
• A custom header with PARS status, the toll-free number and office hours, plus a numbered slide-out menu on phones
• Ambassador Blog Grid, my Elementor widget that renders real posts in the same navy-and-gold system. The posts per page, categories, order, columns per device and colours are all set in the editor. Its stylesheet loads only on pages that use it, and a post without an image gets a branded placeholder
• Branded cover images for the blog articles

What I built: SEO

• Removed the keyword stuffing: from 15–17 repeats down to 2 per ~1,060 words, so the penalty risk is gone
• One domain and one navigation: every link points to .ca, the header and footer match, and the duplicates (/carm-2/, the old /about/ and /services/) redirect to the live pages
• The clickbait titles rewritten into clear titles and descriptions on every key page
• Structured data built from scratch with Rank Math: services with offers and price specifications, articles with authors, the about and contact pages, FAQ and breadcrumbs. That’s nine types in all
• 91 internal-link fixes taken from a linking map
• Six regional landing pages: Toronto, Ottawa, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta. Alongside them, pages for e-commerce customs and HS code classification, and new articles on importing a car from the USA, Amazon FBA, CBSA audits and CUSMA duty savings
• Ambassador SEO Fixes, a plugin that makes missing URLs return a real 404 (or 410 for removed pages) instead of a redirect to the home page, which Google counts as soft 404s. It also lists every Rank Math redirect rule and flags the catch-all one, so the cause can be removed rather than guessed at

Stack and support

The site runs on WordPress with Elementor Pro and custom HTML/CSS sections, Rank Math Pro and my two PHP plugins, with Trustindex for the Google reviews. It’s hosted on Hostinger with LiteSpeed and the QUIC.cloud CDN. Since August it has been on monthly SEO support: new content, metadata, internal links and technical upkeep, all tracked in Search Console.