Built by someone who got tired of paying for every small change.
Keyo started when Roberto hired someone to build his photography portfolio and every edit came with another invoice. He did not own his own business online. So he taught himself to build, then taught himself to be found, and turned both into the agency that now runs local search for service businesses from Toronto to Los Angeles to Dubai.
From photo shoots to page one.
Nothing about Keyo came from an agency playbook. It came from building sites for friends, watching nobody find them, and refusing to accept that as the end of the job.
Started building websites.
Roberto taught himself Squarespace through YouTube and started helping fellow Seneca grads build their portfolios. The sites looked great. Nobody was finding them.
Discovered search.
Design means nothing without visibility. Late nights, trial and error, years of testing. His own photography site started ranking, and the leads started coming in from people he had never met.
The Rolex moment.
Partnered with Johny Watches, a Toronto pre-owned dealer, to rank for the searches that sell watches. Traffic multiplied. Then a letter arrived from Rolex's legal team. The story is below.
Keyo Agency.
What started as helping friends became a firm with a roster, a method and a standard: a handful of new engagements a year, senior attention on every one, and results measured in calls, not rankings.
Three time zones.
A Dubai kitchen company found Keyo through an article written for a Toronto client. The method that wins a map pack in Oakville turned out to work in Los Angeles and Dubai too. Toronto is still home base, and the direct line is still answered by Roberto.
A small Toronto store outranked the authorized dealers.
Johny Watches is an independent pre-owned watch retailer on Eglinton Avenue West. In 2021 Keyo built the pages and the structure to rank the store for the Rolex searches Toronto buyers actually type. It worked well enough that Rolex's corporate legal team sent a cease and desist. They thought the store was posing as an official dealer.
It was not. It had simply been optimized well enough that a small local business sat above billion-dollar authorized retailers. The disclaimer that now lives on every Johny Watches page was written that week, and it has carried the store's independent status ever since. The current numbers are in the Johny Watches case study.
Rolex® is a registered trademark of Rolex SA. Johny Watches is an independent retailer and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rolex SA. The referenced letter is shared for educational purposes only and does not imply any business relationship.
The 2021 letter, redacted. Kept as a reminder that search results are decided by the work, not the size of the company.
Roberto directing a shoot, before Keyo
Years behind a camera taught him to see what the customer sees.
Directing photo shoots is a job of angles: how presentation, emotion and detail land with the person looking. Roberto brought that to search. The pages Keyo builds are written for the customer holding a phone with a leaking pipe, not for a keyword tool, and they are structured so Google and AI answers can read them just as easily.
The other half is technical, and it is done by hand. Roberto goes into the site himself: the rendered crawl, the redirects, the schema, the Business Profile, the indexing. Nothing is handed to a junior, and nothing is delivered as a to-do list for you to figure out.
Small on purpose. Accountable by design.
Most of these are the opposite of how a typical agency is built. Each one exists because Roberto has been on the other side of the invoice.
A handful of new engagements a year
A small roster is what makes senior attention possible. Poor fits are turned away, and the reason is explained.
Calls and leads are the only score
Rankings, impressions and dashboards are instruments. The report answers one question: did the phone ring more.
Month to month
Long contracts protect bad agencies. Keyo earns the next month by delivering this one. Most clients stay well over a year, by choice.
Nothing bought, nothing promised
No paid links, no bought badges, no ranking promised by a date. If the value stops being a multiple of the fee, Roberto says so first.
A ledger, not a promise
Every finding is fixed, skipped with a written reason, or escalated to you. Every page is verified live and indexed before it counts.
A direct line
Calls and texts answered through the day. Text a photo from the job and it becomes a Business Profile post. Text "don't post this" and it stays private.
Established businesses, from the GTA to Dubai.
Trades, retail, restaurants, contractors and a few businesses that do not fit a category. What they share is a service that makes money and an owner who wanted the phone to ring more.
"I started Keyo because I hated feeling powerless over my own business online. That is still the whole job: make sure the owner is never in that position again, and make sure the phone rings while we do it."
Roberto Vazquez · Founder, Keyo Agency
Tell us where the phone should be ringing.
Send the inquiry, call, or text. Your website and your Google Business Profile get read before we reply, and the reply comes from Roberto, not a sales desk.
From $2,500/month · Established businesses · Month to month · A handful of new engagements a year