You have a website. It looks decent. But when you search for your own services in Vancouver, you are not showing up. Not on the first page, not in the map pack, sometimes not at all.
This is more common than you think, and it is almost never about the design. Websites that look perfectly fine can be completely invisible on Google because of technical issues and missing content that most business owners do not know to look for.
Here is what is actually causing it and what you can do to fix each one.
Updated February 2026.
This sounds obvious but it is the most common problem by a wide margin. Google needs your website to explicitly tell it what services you offer and where you offer them. If that information is vague or buried, your pages will not rank for local searches.
"Serving the greater Vancouver area" is not enough. You need to say "HVAC repair in Burnaby" or "licensed plumber in Surrey" on the actual pages targeting those areas. Google is matching your page content to what people type into search. The closer your content matches that language, the better your chances.
Every service you offer should have its own dedicated page. One combined services page with everything listed together gives Google very little to rank individually. A plumbing company with separate pages for drain cleaning, water heater installation, and emergency plumbing will outrank a company with one generic "Services" page almost every time.
Speed is a ranking factor and also a conversion killer. Google's own data shows that most mobile users will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. For trades businesses, where most searches happen on a phone from a job site or a flooded bathroom, that window is even shorter.
The technical causes are usually the same: uncompressed images, slow hosting, themes loaded with code the site does not need, or third-party scripts running on every page. WordPress sites running five or six plugins are common culprits.
You can test your own site right now using Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. Enter your URL and it will show you exactly what is slowing things down along with a score out of 100. Anything below 50 on mobile is a serious problem. Anything below 70 is holding you back.
The fix depends on how the site is built. On modern frameworks like Next.js, pages are pre-rendered as static HTML and served from a global edge network, which gets load times under a second without much effort. On older WordPress sites, you are usually fighting uphill.
If you serve multiple cities around Vancouver, one homepage is not enough to rank in each of them. Google ranks pages, not websites. A page that is specifically about your plumbing services in Coquitlam is what ranks when someone in Coquitlam searches for a plumber.
Location pages do not have to be long, but they need to be genuinely useful. A page that just swaps the city name into the same template text as every other page will not rank. Google has gotten good at detecting that. Each page should mention specific neighbourhoods, reference the types of buildings or jobs common to that area, and include a real call to action.
For most trades businesses serving Metro Vancouver, a location page for each major city you work in (Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey, Richmond, North Vancouver, Coquitlam) gives you six additional opportunities to show up in local searches you are currently missing entirely.
Google switched to mobile-first indexing a few years ago. That means it looks at your mobile site to decide your ranking, not your desktop site. If your mobile experience has problems, those problems directly affect how you rank for everyone, including desktop users.
Common issues that hurt trades sites on mobile: text that is too small to read without zooming, buttons that are too close together to tap reliably, forms that are hard to fill out on a phone screen, and phone numbers that are not click-to-call. That last one is a big deal. If someone has to manually dial your number from a mobile site, most of them will not bother.
Google Search Console has a Mobile Usability report that will flag specific issues on your site. It is free to set up and gives you a clear list of what to fix.
Google favours websites that are useful. For a trades business, that means content that answers the questions your customers are actually typing into search.
"How much does a furnace replacement cost in Vancouver?" is something people search for. If you have a page that answers that question honestly, with real numbers and real context, you have a chance to rank for it. If you do not have that page, a competitor who does will show up instead of you.
You do not need to publish constantly. One solid, useful post per month compounds over time. After a year that is 12 pages each targeting a different question your potential customers are asking. That adds up to a meaningful amount of organic traffic.
Cost guides, service explainers, comparisons between options, and local tips all work well for trades businesses. They build trust before someone calls, and they give Google more content to evaluate when deciding whether your site is authoritative. The local SEO resource for trades businesses covers the content types that perform best for each trade, including GBP, citations, and content timing.
Reviews affect both your Google Business Profile ranking in the map pack and how much trust visitors have when they land on your site. Both matter.
For the map pack specifically, the 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors study puts reviews at around 20% of your local ranking. That is a significant chunk. Not just the total number of reviews but the frequency, the recency, and whether you respond.
On your website itself, visible reviews and testimonials act as conversion signals. A visitor who sees real names, real jobs, and real outcomes from other Vancouver homeowners is much more likely to call than someone who sees nothing but your own marketing copy.
The fastest way to build reviews is to ask right after the job is done. A short text message with your Google review link sent while you are still packing up the van gets a much higher response rate than a follow-up email a week later.
Google cross-references your business information across dozens of directories and websites. If your name, address, or phone number shows up differently in different places, it creates doubt about whether your business is legitimate and active.
"Pacific Plumbing" on Google, "Pacific Plumbing Ltd." on HomeStars, and "Pacific Plumbing Services" on YellowPages looks like three different businesses to an algorithm. Even differences in how you abbreviate Street vs St, or whether you include "Inc." can create noise that quietly drags your rankings down.
A citation audit means going through the major directories and making sure everything matches your Google Business Profile exactly. HomeStars, Yelp, Houzz, YellowPages, and any industry-specific directories should all show the same business name, the same phone number, and the same address. Clutch and UpCity matter too if you want to rank in more competitive searches. The free directory submission tracker has every major Canadian directory pre-loaded with priority tiers and status tracking, so you can work through the list systematically without starting from scratch.
This is one of the less exciting things to fix but it has a real impact on local rankings, especially in competitive trades verticals where the difference between showing up in the map pack and not often comes down to how clean your overall local presence is.
None of these are complicated problems. They are execution problems.
Add location-specific language to every service page. Test your load speed and fix what is hurting it. Build out individual pages for each service. Create location pages for the cities you actually work in. Publish something useful once a month. Ask for reviews after every job. Clean up your directory listings.
Do all of these consistently for six months and you will see a real difference. Most of your competitors in Vancouver are not doing all of them. Some are not doing any of them. The complete local SEO guide for Vancouver trades businesses walks through each of these steps in detail if you want a more thorough playbook.
If you want help figuring out where your site stands right now, get a free estimate and we will go through it with you.
From Digitari Solutions
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