Metro Vancouver
SEO for local businesses in Vancouver and across the Lower Mainland.
Metro Vancouver is twenty one municipalities that people treat as separate places, and they search that way. The work I have done here was for an agency and the businesses it serves, and it is still running without me.
How people in Metro Vancouver search
Metro Vancouver describes itself as a partnership of 21 municipalities, one electoral area and one treaty First Nation. To a searcher, those are real places with their own names: Burnaby, Surrey, Richmond, Coquitlam, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Delta, Langley, Port Moody, Maple Ridge, White Rock and more. Someone in Surrey looking for a personal trainer or a plumber rarely types Vancouver. They type Surrey, or near me, and Google answers from where they stand.
The distances matter too. A business based downtown is a long way, in map terms, from a searcher in Langley or Maple Ridge, and Google weighs distance heavily in the map results. So the businesses that win across the region are the ones with a clear page for each service and a real page for each municipality they actually serve, rather than one page that says Greater Vancouver and hopes.
The work I have done here
An agency owner on the Canadian west coast handed me a framework he had watched work inside American agencies and asked me to copy it. What he actually needed was a business he could sell and hand to someone else to run: a way to price the work before starting it, a diagnostic that gives the same answer whoever runs it, a production line and reporting he could put in front of his clients.
Copying turned into building, and it took a year. The result has five parts: the offer priced in units so a roadmap can be quoted before it starts, a roadmap costed in the same units, a diagnostic that takes a business's listing categories, service list and a crawl and returns the gaps, generators for service pages, topic maps and linking plans, and dashboards he can hand to his own clients. It was proven across personal training, vape retail, publishing, BIM consultancy and pest control, and the agency has run it without me since handover.
The businesses it was proven on, including a Vancouver personal training studio, are the same kind of business this page is for: local, owner-run, and dependent on being found by people who live and work nearby.
What local SEO in Metro Vancouver involves
A page per municipality you really serve
Written about the place: the neighbourhoods you cover, how long it takes to get there, the work you have done there and what people there ask. Not the same page with Burnaby swapped for Coquitlam.
Hubs for the parts of the region
The North Shore, the Tri-Cities, south of the Fraser. Grouping the municipalities you serve the way locals think about them gives Google, and customers, a clear picture of where you work.
A Google listing that matches the site
The right primary category, every service listed, and a service area that matches your pages. If you visit customers, your address hidden, as Google's guidelines ask.
Canadian directories that agree
Your name, address and phone number said exactly the same way on the directories Canadian customers use and Google reads, including the trade and professional ones in your field.
Reviews from customers across the region
A steady flow of genuine reviews, asked for after every job, answered every time.
Downtown versus the rest of the region
Vancouver on its own is the most contested local search in British Columbia, and the map for it is decided heavily by distance from the searcher. A business based in Surrey or Coquitlam cannot win a downtown searcher's map on proximity, however good its listing is.
The municipalities are where most local businesses win. A trainer, a cleaner or a trades firm in Burnaby is a natural answer for searchers in Burnaby and the places next to it. Winning there first, with real pages and a strong listing, usually does more for the phone than a long fight for the city-wide term. The Vancouver page still matters, as the hub the municipal pages strengthen.
What a strong municipal page looks like
Take Burnaby. A page that ranks names the parts of the city the business actually covers, such as Metrotown, Brentwood, Edmonds, Capitol Hill or Burnaby Heights, and says how quickly you get there. It describes the kind of work you do there, answers the questions local customers ask, and links up to the service it belongs to and across to neighbouring municipalities a customer might also be in.
A page like that is useful to the person reading it, which is exactly why Google shows it. A page that only says "we proudly serve Burnaby" is a copy of every other municipal page on the site, and Google tends to treat it that way.
Mistakes I see on Lower Mainland sites
Twenty municipal pages, all the same
A page for every city in the region with identical text. Most are refused by Google, and the rest compete with each other.
A city name in the business name
Adding Vancouver or a service to the name on the Google listing breaks the guidelines and risks suspension.
A service area covering the whole province
Google says a service area should not extend farther than about two hours of driving from the base. Listing all of British Columbia does not widen reach; it breaks a rule.
No answers to the questions people search
Prices, what is included, how long it takes. Local customers compare on these, and the businesses that answer honestly get the call.
How the first month runs
A reading of where you stand
How Google has filed the business, which searches and municipalities you appear for now, and what your listing and directories say. Written down before anything changes.
The quick fixes
A wrong category, a duplicate listing, directories that disagree, pages Google refuses. Often the fastest movement of the whole engagement comes from here.
The map of places and services
Which municipalities get pages, in what order, and which service each supports. The places nearest your base, where you already do the most work, come first.
The first pages, checked live
The first municipal and service pages published, each checked on the site itself and recorded in the portal with the date and the search it targets.
Numbers you can check yourself
Every figure I report comes from your own accounts, with the dates it covers: position in Search Console over a quarter, appearances over a named 28 days, enquiries from your own call and form tracking. You can open the same source and see the same number. If a month is flat, the report says so, and says what is being done about it.
Working with me from Vancouver
I work remotely, and for Vancouver the time difference works in your favour: my working day runs while you sleep, so a fault found in your evening is usually fixed by your morning. You deal with me directly, not an account manager, and approvals and messages go through a portal you can open on your phone.
I also work alongside people in the Vancouver search community, which keeps me close to how the market here is moving. I take a small number of clients at a time, and if I am not the right fit, I will say so in the first reply.
Nearby municipalities
I work with businesses serving Vancouver and nearby municipalities, including Burnaby, Surrey and Richmond. A municipality gets its own page only when there is useful, specific information to publish.
If your municipality has no page here, send me your site and the area you serve. I can assess the opportunity without pretending that a page already exists.
Questions Vancouver businesses ask
Do you need to be in Vancouver to do this well
No. The work happens on your website, your listing and the directories. What matters is understanding how people here search and having built systems for businesses here already.
Can I rank across the whole Lower Mainland
In the ordinary results, with genuine municipal pages, you can reach a wide area. On the map you will be strongest near your base. I will tell you which municipalities are realistic.
Do you work with agencies
Yes. The system described above was built for a Vancouver agency, and I still do search work under agencies' own names for their clients.
Which industries do you work with
Local service businesses: fitness and training, cleaning, trades, clinics, retail and professional services.
How do I start
Send me your site and the municipalities you want work from. I look before I reply.
Run a business in Metro Vancouver?
Send me your site and the places you want to be found. I will tell you what Google currently thinks of it, and what would change that.