A coffee shop on Commercial Drive and one in Yaletown are about six kilometres apart. They share a city, a transit system and a weather forecast. They do not share a customer.
That is the thing generic SEO advice keeps missing about this region. Metro Vancouver is not one market with one search result. It is a partnership of 21 municipalities, one electoral area and one treaty First Nation (sourced from Metro Vancouver), and inside those, dozens of neighbourhoods that behave like separate towns with separate expectations.
Ranking here means picking which of those you are actually trying to win, and then being specific enough that Google believes you.
Metro Vancouver Is 23 Jurisdictions, Not One Market
Someone searching in Burnaby and someone searching in North Vancouver are not looking at the same results page, even for identical words, because distance from the searcher is one of the three things Google weighs in local ranking (sourced from Google Business Profile Help).
This has a practical consequence most businesses get wrong in the same way. They try to rank for "Vancouver," the broadest and most contested term in the region, when the searches they could actually win are narrower and closer: the municipality they are in, the two beside it, and the neighbourhoods where their customers already live.
Winning "coffee shop Mount Pleasant" is achievable. Winning "coffee shop Vancouver" is a multi-year project against businesses with a decade of history. One of those pays rent this quarter.
The framework here works in any Canadian city. Metro Vancouver just makes the point unusually visible, because the boundaries are close together and the neighbourhoods have strong identities.
Start With the Profile, Not the Website
Before touching a page of your site, make the Google Business Profile genuinely complete. It is the asset doing the most work in local search and the one most often left half-built.
Complete means:
Real hours, including holiday hours, kept current
Photography shot at your actual location, not stock. A stock photo of a generic café tells a customer nothing about whether your room is somewhere they want to sit.
Service areas that reflect where you genuinely go. A service area drawn across the whole region to catch more searches makes you look less relevant in every part of it.
Every service listed individually, in the words a customer would search
A steady cadence of posts, rather than a burst in January and silence afterwards
The full profile checklist covers this end to end. It is an afternoon of work and it is the highest-return afternoon available to most local businesses.
How to Work Out Which Neighbourhoods Are Yours
Picking the neighbourhood is the decision the rest of this rests on, and most businesses make it on instinct. There is a better way and it takes about an hour.
Districts do not only differ in location, they differ in intent. Two people searching identical words from Yaletown and from Mount Pleasant are often asking for different things: different price expectations, different urgency, different reason for looking at all. A Kitsilano search for a physiotherapist skews toward sports injuries. The same search two neighbourhoods over does not.
Four ways to find out which districts are actually yours:
Look at where your customers already live. Pull the postal codes off your last fifty invoices. Most businesses find two or three districts producing a disproportionate share, and one they had never noticed. That is data you own and no competitor can see.
Read Search Console for district names. If a neighbourhood is already bringing impressions when you have never once written it down, that is the market telling you where you are half-visible. The fifteen-minute monthly routine covers how to read that report without disappearing into it.
Use autocomplete as a free keyword tool. Type your service followed by a district name and read what Google offers to finish. Those suggestions come from real search volume, so they show you the pairings people actually use rather than the ones that exist only in your head.
Check who currently ranks. Search your service plus the district. If the first page is directories rather than actual businesses, that district is winnable. If three established competitors own it with real pages, start somewhere else.
Then one filter before you commit: only target a district where you have both real customers and something specific to say. Fail either test and you are back to writing a template with the place name swapped.
None of this is Vancouver-specific. The same hour works on Halifax's North End, Calgary's Kensington, or the two districts that matter in a town of twenty thousand.
Neighbourhood Pages That Are Not Templates
Neighbourhood landing pages work. Templated ones do not, and Google has been good at telling the difference for years.
A page at /north-vancouver that is your /burnaby page with the place name swapped is worse than having neither, because it tells Google you have nothing specific to say about either. If a reader could not tell which page they were on with the place name removed, it is a template.
What makes a neighbourhood page real:
Landmarks and streets you would actually mention giving directions
Transit and parking specifics, which matter enormously here and differ block to block
The kind of customer you genuinely see from that area, and what they tend to ask for
Work you have done nearby, described honestly and without naming clients who have not agreed to it
Build two of these properly rather than eleven thinly. If you cannot write four hundred specific words about a neighbourhood, you probably do not serve it well enough to rank for it yet.
Reviews: The Lever Most Businesses Leave Alone
Google states directly that more reviews and positive ratings improve local ranking, and that responding to reviews helps a business stand out (sourced from Google Business Profile Help). Ninety-seven percent of consumers read reviews for local businesses (sourced from BrightLocal), so the same asset does two jobs at once.
Build a quiet, polite review request into the end of every job. Ask while the work is fresh and visible, not three weeks later. Reply to every review inside 48 hours, using the reviewer's name and referring to something specific about their visit. The full guide to asking without making it weird has the scripts.
One Canadian caveat before you automate any of this. Review requests sent by email or text are commercial electronic messages under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation. That means you need consent, express or implied, clear identification of who is sending, and a working unsubscribe mechanism in every message (sourced from the CRTC). An existing customer you have just done work for generally falls under implied consent. A list you bought does not. If you would rather not think about it at all, ask in person or over the phone, which CASL does not cover. This is general guidance rather than legal advice, and worth putting to counsel before you build anything automated.
Structured Data: What It Actually Does
LocalBusiness schema is worth adding, and it is worth being accurate about why.
Google's documentation says structured data can make your business eligible for a knowledge panel in Search and Maps, and for business carousels when someone searches a category rather than a name (sourced from Google Search Central). What Google does not claim anywhere is a ranking boost or a specific lift in click-through rate, so treat any agency quoting you a percentage on this as someone who has not read the documentation.
It is still cheap, invisible to users, and one of the few genuinely free improvements left. Add it. Just add it for the right reason.
Where to Start
Pick the one municipality and two neighbourhoods you most want to be found in. Finish the profile. Build one real page for one of those neighbourhoods. Ask your next five happy customers for a review. If it keeps not happening, that is also what a local SEO engagement does for you.
That is a month of small work, and it will move you further than a year of trying to rank for "Vancouver." Which neighbourhood would you actually pick?