The Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) maintains a stack of web-related policy instruments that govern Government of Canada digital. Vendors selling to the federal government need a working reference — not the 80-page policy PDFs.
**Policy on Service and Digital** — the umbrella policy. Sets the expectation that GoC services and information are accessible, secure, multilingual, and well-designed.
**Directive on Service and Digital** — the implementation directive that operationalizes the policy. Section 4.4 covers web channels.
**Standard on Web Accessibility (SWA)** — WCAG 2.0 AA conformance for GoC web content.
**Standard on Optimizing Websites and Applications for Mobile Devices** — responsive web is the federal default.
**Standard on Web Usability** — usability principles for GoC web.
**Standard on Web Interoperability** — RSS, structured data, and machine-readable formats.
**Communications Policy of the Government of Canada** — plain-language and visual-identity expectations.
**Policy on Communications and Federal Identity** + **Federal Identity Program manual** — the FIP signature, wordmark, and visual-identity rules.
Vendors don't need to memorize these. We do. What vendors need is a corporate site that doesn't actively contradict the standards your buyer enforces internally. Our team's perspective on treasury board web standards comes from active client work, not theory. Senior strategists own every treasury board web standards engagement here — never juniors learning on your account.
Your corporate site is not a GoC site — TBS standards don't directly bind you. But the same procurement officer who enforces the standards on internal projects is also reviewing your corporate site during RFP evaluation. Two operational implications:
1. **Your site shouldn't ship anything obviously non-conformant.** No images of text, no PDF-only content, no English-only material on bilingual files.
2. **Your team page and capability statement should signal you understand the stack.** Mention SWA, OLA bilingual posture, and FIP awareness in your past-performance descriptions where applicable. Considering treasury board web standards? Book a no-pressure strategy call to compare options.
For businesses, the SEO landscape has fundamentally changed in the last two years. Google now weighs Map Pack visibility, Google Business Profile signals, and reviews far more heavily than traditional on-page SEO factors for local service queries. That shift rewards businesses who treat their digital presence as an integrated system — Google Business Profile fully optimized with weekly posts and photo uploads, service-area pages that demonstrate real geographic relevance, structured data that surfaces in rich results, and a steady stream of authentic reviews tied to specific service categories. The businesses who win the Ottawa market in 2026 do all of this consistently, while the rest are stuck watching their phone-call volume drop quarter over quarter without understanding why. Our job is to give you the playbook and the senior-strategist execution that makes the difference between watching your competitors win and being the competitor everyone else is watching. We've shipped this work for businesses across Canada, and the patterns that drive results are remarkably consistent — when you execute them with discipline and at the standard the modern SERP demands.
The biggest mistake we see in modern SEO is teams trying to do everything at once. The work that actually drives rankings happens in a specific order: foundational technical SEO first (so Google can crawl and index correctly), then on-page content optimization (so the right pages target the right intent), then authority building through digital PR and editorial content (so Google trusts the domain), then continuous measurement and refinement (so the program compounds rather than plateaus). Skip any step or do them in the wrong order and you waste budget. Every program we ship follows this exact sequence, scaled to the client's competitive market and budget level.
TBS publishes the active instruments at canada.ca/tbs/policies. The Policy on Service and Digital is the current umbrella; older instruments (Policy on Communications, Standard on Web Usability, etc.) are still in force unless explicitly rescinded.
Most Crown corporations are not bound by TBS policies — they have their own boards. But many adopt TBS standards by reference, and the practical accessibility/bilingual expectations are very similar.
Senior strategists with 8+ years of agency experience own the engagement from day one. We don't hand off to junior account managers. You get the same person on every call, every month, who knows your business in detail.
Three KPIs we review monthly: (1) qualified organic traffic to commercial-intent pages, (2) Map Pack and rich-result placements for target keywords, and (3) lead volume from organic channels. Vanity metrics like total impressions get reported but never become the goal.
Yes — our portfolio shows real before/after rankings, traffic graphs, and lead changes for past clients. A small slice is under NDA; we walk through those on discovery calls. Be wary of any agency that won't show real numbers from real clients.