Most people who run marketing agencies talk about results. Josh Shankowsky decided to build one instead.
Shankowsky is the founder of Snap SEO, an Edmonton based digital marketing agency that handles search engine optimization, Google Ads, and web design for businesses across Canada and the United States. He is also the person behind Aurora Admin, an aurora watch forecast Edmonton chasers rely on, part of a broader northern lights forecasting platform that now ranks for thousands of keywords in more than 40 countries and delivers over 500,000 aurora forecasts a year.
The two projects are not unrelated. Aurora Admin exists because Shankowsky wanted proof that his SEO methodology actually works before he asked anyone else to trust it with their business.
From the Farm to the Forecast, How the Idea Started
Long before Snap SEO existed, Shankowsky was watching the northern lights from his family’s farm in rural Alberta. He remembers standing outside as a kid, the sky lighting up, and catching the excitement on his mom’s face.
That memory stayed with him. Years later, while chasing the aurora with a small group of friends, he started digging into the actual science behind when and where the lights show up. The group compared satellite data and tracked solar activity together, but Shankowsky found the forecasting tools everyone else relied on did not work the way his brain did.
“I always hated the charts and graphs. It’s just not how I learned,” he has said of the early research. “I need something where I could look at the information, and it makes sense to me.”
So he built his own version. Drawing on a background as an instrumentation technician, he started reorganizing satellite data into a system that made sense to him, then noticed something the standard models missed: a consistent delay between when solar activity showed up on instruments and when the aurora actually became visible in the sky, often five to ten minutes later.
That observation became the foundation of Aurora Admin.
Building a Real Product, Not Just a Portfolio Piece
Aurora Admin pulls data from multiple sources, including NOAA, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. Instead of leaning on the decades old Kp index that most aurora apps still use, the platform focuses on hemispheric power, solar positioning, and location based modelling to produce sharper forecasts.
Users get real time SMS alerts, a deliberate choice since aurora chasing often happens in remote areas with limited connectivity, where a text is far more likely to get through than an app notification. Alerts typically arrive 30 to 60 minutes before activity is expected, with an accuracy range Shankowsky and his team continue to refine.
For Shankowsky, the appeal of building a real product was that it forced honesty. A marketing agency can claim its strategies work. A website ranking for thousands of keywords across 40 plus countries, drawing coverage from outlets like AP News, Fox News, and Yahoo, is harder to argue with.
The Same Playbook, Applied to Local Businesses
Snap SEO takes the same approach with its clients that Shankowsky took with Aurora Admin: understand the actual mechanics of how something works, then build around that understanding instead of copying whatever the last agency did.
At Snap SEO, that shows up as a framework the agency calls B.O.O.S.T, covering branding and authority, on-page optimization, off-page link building, social and local signals, and technical health. The agency has picked up recognition for the approach, including a global top five ranking from Agency Spotter in April 2026, where it was the only Canadian agency to make the list.
Shankowsky’s background outside of marketing plays a bigger role in that than most people expect. Before founding Snap SEO, he worked as an instrumentation technician and was an early adopter of platforms like Gmail, Windows Vista, and Coursera during their beta phases. That habit of digging into how systems actually function, rather than accepting the surface level explanation, carried directly into how he approaches search engines.
“Most SEO agencies follow the same playbook,” Shankowsky has said of the industry. “Run an audit, send a proposal with generic recommendations, lock clients into a long contract, and hope nobody asks too many questions about what’s actually being done.”
Aurora Admin became his answer to that pattern. If a strategy could rank a niche forecasting site against established weather platforms and tourism boards, in a category with real seasonal demand and international competition, it was a strategy worth applying to smaller, local businesses trying to compete in their own markets.
Why It Matters for Edmonton Businesses Specifically
Snap SEO’s client work stays close to home in Alberta while reaching businesses further afield. The agency has helped a home renovation company post a dramatic jump in organic clicks, supported an HVAC company through a large increase in Google visibility, and worked with e-commerce and local retail clients on similar growth.
Shankowsky argues that Edmonton’s business landscape rewards this kind of grounded, systems first thinking more than most cities realize. The city’s economy spans industrial and manufacturing work in Nisku and Acheson, downtown professional services, seasonal trades like HVAC and roofing, and a growing retail and hospitality core. Each of those groups searches differently, and a one-size-fits-all SEO package tends to miss most of them.
That is the same instinct that built Aurora Admin. Instead of assuming the standard model was correct, Shankowsky tested it against what he actually observed, adjusted for what he found, and built something more accurate as a result.
Aurora Admin remains a passion project first. But for anyone evaluating whether Shankowsky’s SEO methodology holds up outside of a sales pitch, it stands as one of the more unusual proof points in the industry: an Edmonton founder who ranked his own product before asking anyone else to trust him with theirs.
