Your rankings went up. Did the phone ring?
Every Vancouver SEO report answers the first question. We start with the second, which means the tracking gets built before the content does — so by month three you know whether the work is paying for itself.
Three ways an SEO
invoice buys nothing
Each one produces a report that is factually correct and commercially worthless. We look for all three before quoting, because if one is present, whatever you buy next lands on top of it.
First place for something nobody was buying
Your own company name. A phrase with a hundred searches a month and no purchase behind any of them. Both go into the report as position one, and both are true. Neither one is a customer walking in.
First place, one full swipe below the fold
Search almost any service in Vancouver and Google puts a map block on top — three businesses, star ratings, a Directions button. The first organic result starts underneath it. On a phone that is a full swipe away. Impressions climb. Nobody arrives.
Six months of data that measured nothing
Someone taps the phone number. Nothing fires. Someone sends the form. Nothing fires. The monthly report still arrives on time, full of charts, and not one of them can tell you whether last month was a good month.
Four things,
and this sequence
Run them out of order and you pay to publish content that Google was never going to look at.
- Find out what Google is actually readingGoogle gives every site a fixed amount of attention. Spend it on redirect chains, 404s and pages it has already decided not to index, and your money pages queue up behind the dead ones. This is the first thing we open, every time.
- Separate the buyers from the tourists"seo vancouver" and "seo vancouver jobs" both contain your service and your city. One is somebody looking to hire you. The other is somebody looking to be hired. Volume can't tell them apart — intent can.
- One page per search, and only oneTwo pages chasing the same phrase don't double your odds. They split the signal, and Google picks one — often the weaker one, sometimes a blog post from 2021.
- Wire the tracking before the work startsThe lead is the tap on the phone number, not the page view. If that tap isn't sending a signal on day one, month four becomes an argument about numbers nobody recorded.
The tallest spike on this chart is before we started
Twelve months of Search Console, uncropped. That November peak is the industry's buying season and has nothing to do with anyone's work. The arrow is the day we took over — and for two months after it, the line does nothing at all.
In a seasonal business the only fair comparison is season against season. Their peak buying month last year produced 645 clicks; this August, well outside that window, produced 530. Underneath that number are model-specific product pages — the kind of search where somebody already knows the exact part they want — sitting between positions seven and ten, which is where the rich results come from. May and June came in below April before anything moved in July. That is the normal shape of this work, and we would rather show it than crop it out. Every site starts from a different condition, so treat these as one company's numbers, not a forecast for yours.
Nothing is broken.
The leads still don't come
One company built the site. A second does the SEO. A third runs the ads. Each of them is doing their part correctly, and the thing that's actually broken is living in the gaps between them — where nobody is looking, because nobody is paid to. You get three invoices and three explanations, each pointing at the other two.
The map block sits above everything you're optimising
Getting into those three results is a different job from ranking a page, and your website is only part of what decides it.
- Categories that match what you sellNot what you'd like to sell. The primary category on your Google Business Profile does more work than any other single setting, and most profiles have it set to something chosen in a hurry years ago.
- One name, one address, one phoneAcross the profile, the site, and the directories that listed you back when your number was different. Google is comparing them whether or not anyone told you.
- Reviews as a habit, not a campaignCount matters. Pace matters more. Twelve reviews in one week reads as exactly what it is.
- City pages only where you can say something trueA page about Burnaby that is the Surrey page with the city swapped is worse than no page. If we can't write something specific about working there, we don't build it.
One thing worth hearing before you sign anything: map results depend heavily on how close the searcher is standing to you. Someone in Langley may never see a Richmond business, no matter what either of us does. Anyone promising otherwise is selling you the part they don't control.
Five things we won't say
You will hear at least three of them somewhere else this week. Easier to deal with them now than in month four.
"We guarantee page one"
Nobody has a switch for Google's index. When someone guarantees position one, they have either picked a phrase with no competition in it, or they are planning to renegotiate the word "rank" around month four.
"You'll see leads by [date]"
An indexation problem can clear in a few weeks. A competitive Vancouver commercial phrase can take most of a year. Which one you're sitting on depends on the state of your site, and neither of us knows that until it's open.
"SEO means you can stop paying for ads"
Ads answer "does anyone want this" in about a week. SEO answers "can we own this" in about a year. Different questions, different timelines. Most businesses here need both, in different sizes, and the mix changes.
"You need more content"
It is routine to open a site with several hundred published posts and find that Google crawled most of them and indexed almost none. Publishing the next one into that condition is not a strategy. Finding out why the first three hundred are invisible is.
"Here's our monthly package"
What this costs depends on what the audit finds, and we haven't looked yet. Anyone quoting a monthly figure before opening your Search Console is quoting a template, not your situation.
Send a URL,
get a real read
The audit is written by hand and it is the same document we'd use internally. It is not a PDF generator with your logo dropped in the corner.
Step 01
Send the URL
One line on what the business does and what a good customer looks like. Nothing else needed to start.
Step 02
We open it up
How much of your site Google has actually indexed, which searches you already appear for, where the map block is costing you, and whether anything is measuring. Back within a week.
Step 03
A plan with a price on it
What we'd fix first, why that order, what it costs and what it won't solve. If Google Ads is the better use of your money this quarter, we'll say that instead.
Step 04
You keep the login
Search Console and conversion tracking stay in your account, so you can check any number in our report against the source while we're still on the call.
Straight answers
How long before I see anything?
Indexation and technical problems can move in four to eight weeks, because you're removing an obstacle rather than building authority. Competitive commercial phrases in Vancouver usually take three to six months, longer if the domain is young or has a messy history. The audit tells you which of the two you're looking at, and we'd rather say "this one is slow" up front than discover it together in month five.
What does it cost?
We don't publish a monthly number, because the honest answer depends on what the audit finds — a site with a clean technical base and a site with three years of redirect damage are not the same job. The audit is free and the quote comes with it, before you've committed to anything.
Do you do the work, or is it outsourced?
Same people who build the sites and run the Google Ads. You speak to whoever is doing the work, not to an account manager relaying it. That's been the setup since 2011.
My site is on Wix, Shopify or Squarespace.
Usually fine, with one limit worth naming early: some platforms cap what you can control technically, and if that ceiling is what's holding you back, no amount of monthly work gets past it. The audit will tell you that plainly instead of selling you twelve months of content around the problem.
Most of our customers are Chinese-speaking.
That's a large part of what we do, and there's a pattern worth knowing: Chinese-speaking owners in Metro Vancouver often run Google in Chinese but type their searches in English. Which language your pages belong in depends on how your buyers search, not on which language you and your team prefer. We check that before recommending anything.
Do you work outside Vancouver?
Metro Vancouver is home and the Greater Toronto Area is our second market. The work itself is remote either way — the part that benefits from being local is understanding how people here actually search, and that travels with us.
Send us the URL
You'll get back a written read on what's holding the site back — and a straight answer on whether we're the right people to fix it.
