Plenty of Island businesses don’t sit in one tidy town. They drive. The mobile mechanic who covers the whole Cowichan Valley, the cleaning company working Nanaimo to Parksville, the contractor who’ll travel from Campbell River to Comox — for them, local SEO gets a little trickier. But the opportunity is bigger, too.
Here's a problem I run into all the time. A business serves eight communities up and down the Island, does great work in every one of them — and their website is optimized for exactly one town. Usually wherever the owner happens to live. So they rank beautifully in, say, Duncan, and are completely absent everywhere else they'd happily drive to.
From the outside it looks like they're choosing to ignore all those other markets. They're not. They just never told Google about them. And Google, bless it, is not a mind reader.
One page can't do the job of eight
The instinct most owners have is to cram every town into one homepage: "We serve Victoria, Duncan, Nanaimo, Courtenay, Campbell River, Parksville…" and so on, in a long sad list at the bottom of the page. It feels thorough. It does almost nothing.
Google wants substance for each place, not a list. When someone in Parksville searches, Google is looking for a page that genuinely speaks to Parksville — the kind of work you do there, maybe a job you've completed nearby, the specific neighbourhoods or landmarks people recognize. A real page beats a comma in a list every single time. That's the core argument behind a Multi-Location SEO Audit.
How to cover a lot of ground without making a mess
The trap on the other side is just as common: someone reads "make a page for each town" and ends up with a dozen near-identical pages where only the town name changes. Google sees right through that, and frankly, so do customers. Here's the balance I aim for:
- Give each priority community a real, distinct page. Focus on the towns that matter most to your business first. You don't need all forty Island communities — you need the handful that actually drive revenue.
- Make each page genuinely different. Mention local context, the specific services in demand there, travel or service-area notes, even a nearby project you're proud of. Make it feel like it was written by someone who actually goes there.
- Keep your Google Business Profile honest about your service area. If you're a service-area business rather than a storefront, set that up properly so Google understands the radius you cover.
- Link your pages together sensibly. Your "areas we serve" hub should connect cleanly to each community page, so both Google and visitors can find their way around.
The reward for getting this right
When a multi-area business finally gets its local presence sorted — something a multi-location SEO audit is built specifically to help with — the change can feel almost unfair. Suddenly you're turning up for searches in towns where you were previously invisible — towns full of people who needed exactly your service and simply couldn't find you. You weren't losing those jobs to better competitors. You were losing them to a gap in your website.
The Island rewards businesses willing to go the distance — and your online presence should reflect that range, not hide it. If you'll drive to Telegraph Cove for the right job, there's no reason Google shouldn't know it.
My honest advice: don't try to boil the ocean. Pick your three or four most valuable communities, build them out properly, and prove to yourself the approach works before expanding. Done thoughtfully, serving the whole Island online is absolutely within reach for a small business — it just takes a plan instead of a comma-separated list.
Written by Michael Perks — Island Rank Canada, Duncan, BC. If you serve more of the Island than your website lets on, that's exactly the kind of thing a multi-location audit pins down.