SEO in Vancouver, WA

What’s different about search here

The challenges of marketing a Vancouver, WA business online.

Most local search advice assumes your city has a name that belongs to you and a radius that lies flat. Neither’s true here. Both cost you, and both are easy to miss because they look like somebody else’s problem until you go looking at your own numbers.

The two letters aren’t optional anywhere

The fix for the name is boring and it has to be everywhere. WA or Washington in the page title, in the heading, in the address, in the profile, in the URL. Not sprinkled in for flavor, but in every place Google reads when it decides which Vancouver a page belongs to.

It reads as pedantic right up until you look at where the unqualified term actually sends people. A page that just says “Vancouver” has handed away the one decision it needed to make.

A lot of your radius isn’t yours to work

A local business gets shown in a shape drawn around its own address, a few miles across, depending on how tightly Google draws the map where you sit. Put that shape on a Vancouver address and a slice of it is the Columbia, and most of what’s left below the water is Oregon.

For a service business that second part isn’t a driving-distance problem, it’s a licensing one. Washington and Oregon license separately. A contractor registered with Labor & Industries here isn’t thereby licensed with the Construction Contractors Board down there, and an attorney admitted in Washington can’t simply pick up an Oregon matter. Plenty of firms carry both. Plenty deliberately don’t.

Which means most Vancouver service businesses and law firms aren’t counting on Portland work at all, and the honest version of a local plan says so out loud instead of quietly selling you a radius half of which you couldn’t serve if it called.

The same wall runs the other way, and that part is good news. Portland service businesses mostly aren’t coming north either. The competitive field you’re actually in is a lot smaller than the size of this metro suggests, and it’s a field where showing up properly still wins.

The traffic across the bridge runs one direction

Retail is the exception, and it moves south. Oregon has no sales tax, so Washington residents cross to shop, and Portland retail has been quietly banking that for decades. If you sell things over a counter, the bridge is a feature.

Everything else is asymmetric in a way that catches people out. Talk to enough people on both sides over enough years and the pattern is hard to miss: nearly everybody in Vancouver has spent time in Portland. There are plenty of Portlanders who have never once come north.

That’s not a rivalry, it’s a marketing fact with a price tag. Being findable to somebody who doesn’t think of your city as a place they go is expensive, and it’s the single most common way a Vancouver budget gets spent on nothing. Fill in the half of the market that already knows you exist first.

The city is smaller than your customer list

Vancouver is fed by its suburbs to a degree that surprises people who move here. A large share of the people with a Vancouver mailing address don’t live inside the city limits at all. Hazel Dell, Salmon Creek, Orchards, Five Corners and Felida are unincorporated Clark County, and the people in them think of themselves as living in Vancouver because their mail says so.

Past those are the incorporated towns that shop, eat and hire here anyway. Camas and Washougal east along the river, Battle Ground and Ridgefield to the north, La Center past them.

We keep the full list of all 71 Vancouver neighborhoods and the eleven unincorporated county areas on its own page, taken from the city and the county directly.

Two things follow from that, and both are practical. The customer you want is often searching by the name of their own neighborhood rather than by “Vancouver,” which is a set of searches that goes uncontested because almost nobody bothers with it. And the useful part of that clipped radius runs north and east, which is exactly where the ring is. The river takes the bottom of your circle. The suburbs hand it back.

The state line has consequences past search as well, in bonding and in tax, and they’re worth knowing before you decide to work both sides of it.

Where a Vancouver business usually starts

Be findable here, then be worth choosing.

Almost nobody should buy all of it at once, and in a market this size the order matters more than the budget.

Search gets somebody to you, and stops there. What the site does once they arrive is a separate job, and only one of the three is design. If you’re weighing the whole thing rather than search on its own, hiring an agency across the border is the wider question.

Being findable only matters if we know your trade. Twenty kinds of business, each with a page of its own, is the shortest way to check.

Everything we do is listed here, and how pricing works is on the homepage, including why we won’t quote a number before we’ve looked at your business.