When a water heater fails in Kelowna or a furnace quits in Surrey in January, nobody compares ten websites. They search on their phone, look at the map, check a few reviews and call. Local SEO for a plumbing or HVAC company is about being one of the businesses on that short list, and looking trustworthy when you are.
None of it is a trick. It's a handful of things done properly and kept up. Here's the practical version for trades businesses in British Columbia.
Quick answer: how do plumbers and HVAC companies get found on Google in BC?
Set up your Google Business Profile by Google's rules (the right category, a service area instead of a home address, real hours and photos), give each main service its own page on your website, add area pages only where you actually work and have something specific to say, ask every happy customer for a review, keep your business details the same everywhere they're listed, and show your Technical Safety BC licence number if you do gas, electrical or refrigeration work. Then measure calls and inquiries, not just rankings. Nobody can promise a position on Google, and that includes us.
How Google picks the local results
Google says local results are based mainly on three things: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance (how far you are from the person searching) and prominence (how well known you are, from links, reviews and ratings). It also says there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking (Google's own explanation).
That's useful, because it tells you where to spend your time. You can't move your shop closer to every customer. You can make your profile and website clearly relevant, and you can build prominence over time.
Your Google Business Profile, set up by the rules
Most plumbers and HVAC contractors work at the customer's address, which makes them a service-area business in Google's terms. Google's guidelines are specific:
- Hide your address if customers don't come to you. Google says a service-area business should hide it.
- Set a service area by city or postal code. You can list up to 20 (Google's help), and the overall area shouldn't extend beyond about two hours' drive from where you're based. A Kelowna plumber listing Vancouver won't help.
- Use your real business name. No "Best Plumber Kelowna 24/7" in the name field. Keywords and taglines there break the guidelines.
- One profile per location. A virtual office or a rented mailbox isn't eligible for a profile.
- Pick the right primary category (for example Plumber, or HVAC contractor) and add secondary ones only for work you actually do.
- Fill in the rest. Hours (including whether you take after-hours calls, only if you really do), services, photos of real jobs, your crew and your vans. Google lists complete information, photos and replies to reviews among the things that help.
Service pages and area pages
Your website is where relevance gets built. Two kinds of pages do most of the work.
Service pages. One page for each service you want to be found for: drain cleaning, water heater replacement, gas line installation, furnace repair, heat pump installation, AC service. Each one should say what you do, what it involves, where you do it, what happens when someone calls, and how to reach you from a phone with one tap.
Area pages. A page for each town you serve can help, but only if it says something true and specific to that area: which services you offer there, how you cover it, what's different about the housing stock or the call-outs. Google's spam policies call out doorway pages and scaled content made mainly to rank. The same page copied twelve times with a new city name is exactly that.
We built this structure for Captain Plumber in Kelowna: 28 service and area pages, covering work like drain cleaning, leak detection and gas line installation, and areas including Kelowna, West Kelowna, Lake Country and Peachland. The case study explains the decisions behind it.
If your current site is a single page with a phone number, see what we put into websites for contractors.
Reviews: ask everyone, the same way
Reviews feed prominence, and they're what a homeowner reads before calling. A few rules keep them working for you:
- Ask every customer, right after the job. A text or email with a direct link to your review form, sent by the tech or the office the same day.
- Don't pay for them. Google doesn't allow discounts, freebies or payment in exchange for reviews, and it doesn't allow asking only the happy customers either (Google's policy). Breaking this can get new reviews blocked on your profile, or a warning shown to customers.
- Reply to every review. Thank the good ones by name and job. Answer the bad ones calmly, with facts and an offer to make it right.
The easiest way to make the asking happen is to build it into the end of the job, so it doesn't depend on someone remembering. That's one of the follow-ups we cover in contractor lead generation.
Citations: the same details everywhere
A citation is any listing of your business name, phone number and address or area: directories, your supplier's dealer locator, the local chamber of commerce, industry associations. Keep the details identical everywhere, and fix old listings when you move or change numbers.
A few BC-specific ones are worth knowing:
- Technical Safety BC's licensed contractor registry. If your company holds a contractor licence for gas, electrical or refrigeration work, it's listed there with the scope of work it's licensed for, and homeowners can look you up by name or licence number. Make sure the name matches the one on your profile and website.
- Better Homes BC's Find a contractor tool. For HVAC contractors doing heat pump and energy upgrades, it lists program-registered contractors, who are members of the Home Performance Contractor Network.
- Manufacturer dealer locators, if you're an authorized dealer or installer for a furnace, heat pump or water heater brand.
Show your licence number
This one is BC-specific and easy to miss. Technical Safety BC says licensed contractors in electrical, gas, elevating devices, and boilers, pressure vessels and refrigeration must add their licence number to all digital and print advertising, and that includes your website (Technical Safety BC's advertising guidelines). Put it in your site footer and on your quotes. It's a requirement, and it's also a trust signal for a homeowner choosing who to let into their basement.
Okanagan or Lower Mainland: same work, different competition
The basics don't change between Penticton and Burnaby. The competition does. In the Okanagan, a well-built profile, honest area pages and steady reviews go a long way. In Metro Vancouver, more companies do all of that, so service pages need more depth, and narrowing your service area to where you really want work often beats claiming the whole region. We wrote up local pages for both: Okanagan and Vancouver SEO.
For the wider version of this guide, covering keywords, on-page basics and content, see SEO for contractors in Canada.
Measure calls, not just rankings
- Google Business Profile performance shows calls, website clicks and direction requests from your profile.
- Google Search Console shows which searches bring people to your site and which pages they land on.
- Your own records are what count: how many calls and form inquiries came in, for which service, from which area, and how many became jobs.
Look at all three together every month. A ranking you can't connect to a phone call is just a number.
Where we come in
We're a small studio in British Columbia, with Loic in Kelowna and Leif in Vancouver. We build websites for trades businesses and do local SEO: profiles, service and area pages, the technical basics and the measurement. We don't promise rankings. We'll show you the work and the evidence, and make the next decisions from it.
If you're a plumbing or HVAC company in BC and you're not sure why the phone isn't ringing from Google, send us your website. We'll tell you honestly what we'd fix first, and whether you need us for it.
