Port Alberni SEO, with the numbers on the table.
A short list of signals decides most local search. We fix them in the order that moves the map, show you the before and after on every one, and never promise a ranking nobody can control.
Baseline first, scoped and quoted before anything starts, no rank guarantees from anyone
| Searches you were found for | Clicks | Impressions | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| furnace repair near me | 214 | 5,120 | 3.2 |
| furnace repair port alberni | 167 | 1,240 | 1.4 |
| heating contractor | 96 | 4,870 | 7.8 |
| heat pump installation port alberni | 81 | 960 | 2.1 |
| furnace not turning on | 58 | 3,410 | 11.6 |
| emergency furnace repair | 44 | 1,690 | 5.3 |
Website report · September
Sep 1 – Sep 30, 2026 · sent to you on Oct 1
- Holiday hours added to the contact pageSep 3Content
- New staff photo on AboutSep 12Content
- Booking form now sends a text confirmationSep 20Feature
- Security updates applied — 4Sep 24Maintenance
- Broken link to the old menu PDF fixedSep 27Fix
- Google Business Profile first
- Reviews earned, never written
- A baseline before any change
- No rank guarantees
Four groups of signals. Most of the map pack.
Whitespark's 2026 survey asked 47 local SEO practitioners to weight what moves local rankings. Four groups carried 86 percent between them. We work those four first, and everything else after.
Google Business Profile, 32 percent
The listing itself: primary and secondary categories, name, address, hours, service area, products, services, photos. Sterling Sky finds the primary category is the single most influential factor on the list, and most businesses set it once and never look again.
Reviews, 20 percent
How many, how good, how recent, and what the text says. No shortcut exists. Reviews come from customers one at a time, and the businesses with plenty of them ask every single time.
On-page, 19 percent
What is on the website: the words, the page title, the headings, the address in real text, internal links, and whether a page exists at all for what people search. Most local sites have no page for half of what the business sells.
Links, 15 percent
Who else on the web points at the site, and whether those places are real. In a town this size that means suppliers, the chamber, the teams you sponsor, the local paper and your neighbours on the street. Slow, and never bought.
The rest of the weight
Distance is part of every local result and nobody can edit it. A shop on Third Avenue ranks differently for someone searching from Cherry Creek than for someone outside the door. That is the map working as designed, and we plan around it.
Nobody optimises a town. They optimise a listing.
Local SEO is a short list of unglamorous jobs, done properly and kept up. Here is the order we run them in.
First, what is already there: the Google Business Profile, the website, existing citations, and where the business sits today for the handful of searches that matter. That baseline is taken before anything is touched. Without it, nobody can tell later whether the work moved the numbers or the season did.
Then the profile. The primary category is chosen against what people actually search, not what the business calls itself on invoices. Then secondary categories, the service area, the hours nobody updated, and photos of the real premises. Products and services get filled in too, because an empty field is a signal of its own.
Then the site. One page per thing the business sells, written for someone deciding, with the town named where it belongs and nowhere else. A page repeating "Port Alberni" fourteen times reads as spam to a person and earns nothing extra from Google. That trick died about two decades ago and still gets sold.
Then reviews. The ask goes in at the moment the job is done and the customer is happy, because that is the moment it works. A short link, a set routine for who sends it, and replies to every review that comes in, bad ones included. An unanswered review is a signal too.
Then the slow part: mentions and links from places that exist in the real world. In this valley that is the chamber, suppliers, community sport and anyone the business already works with. It takes months, has no shortcut, and is the first thing a cheap SEO package quietly drops. We keep at it.
You get the numbers we get.
Every account is created in the business name with the business as owner, so the data stays behind when the engagement ends. Nothing here is a screenshot pasted into a slide.
- Search ConsoleImpressions, clicks and average position for every query the site shows up for. Your property, your login.
- Business ProfileCalls, direction requests, website taps, and which searches put the listing in front of someone.
- The baselineTaken before the first change, so every later number has something honest to sit against.
What we will not tell you. And what replaces it.
Four claims get made about SEO constantly. Not one of them can be kept, by us or by anybody else, and a page that made them would contradict every other page on this site.
Never promised
- A ranking position. Nobody controls the ranking, and a quoted position is a guess wearing a number
- A date. Profile work can move in days, links and reviews take months, and the two are not averaged
- Number one on Google. There is no single number one — results differ by who is searching and where they are standing
- A traffic figure. We work from the searches that exist, not from a target somebody wanted to hear
Promised instead
- A baseline taken before anything is touched
- Every account in the business name, owned by the business
- A written record of what was changed and when it changed
- The raw numbers from your own properties, not a summary of them
When SEO is the wrong answer
- If nobody searches for it, search cannot send them. Some businesses are found other ways, and we will tell you so
- If the site is broken, slow or unreadable on a phone, that gets fixed first — the website plan is usually the cheaper end of that
- If the business is brand new with no reviews and no links, the first months are groundwork. Calling groundwork a result is how this industry earned its reputation
Port Alberni, and the valley around it.
We are based in Port Alberni, and for local search that counts. We know people search for the Alberni Valley as often as the city, that Cherry Creek, Beaver Creek and Sproat Lake are how people say where they are, and that a service area drawn to the highway is different from one drawn to the town.
Before we start
The six questions that come up every time, answered the same way here as on the phone.
How long does local SEO take?
Google Business Profile changes can show within days. Reviews and links move over months. Anyone quoting you a date is guessing. The first real read comes from comparing against the baseline we take before anything changes.
Can you guarantee first place on Google?
No, and nobody else can either. Rankings are not for sale and nobody controls them. What we work on is getting your listing, site and reviews into better shape than the businesses you compete with. That is the whole job.
What matters most on a Google Business Profile?
The primary category. Sterling Sky research finds it is the single most influential factor in local rankings, and most businesses set it once when they claimed the listing and never touched it again.
Do I need a new website before SEO will work?
Not always. If the site loads fast, reads well on a phone and can have pages added, we work with it. If it cannot, replacing it usually costs less than fighting it.
Do you write the reviews?
No. Reviews come from customers or they are worthless, and writing or buying them breaks Google policy and can cost you the listing. We build the ask into the job and handle the replies.
Do you only do SEO in Port Alberni?
No. We are based in Port Alberni and work with businesses across Canada. Local search is the service where being in town pays off, which is why this page focuses on it.
Start with what you already have.
Tell us the searches you want to show up for. We come back with the real shape of your listing and site before any work is quoted.
Book a call