A facilities manager needs a supplier. Five years ago she asked two colleagues and called whoever they named. Last month she opened ChatGPT, typed a question about suppliers in the Tri-Cities, got four company names back, and called those four.
That is the whole story. If your company was not one of the four, you did not lose the deal. You were never in it.
I hear the same thing from owners in Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, and Port Moody. Business is steady, referrals are good, the crews are busy. And nobody can explain why a competitor with worse work keeps showing up on lists they have never been on. Usually the answer is boring: the competitor has pages a machine can read, and you do not.
The shortlist is being built without you
Buyers still ask people they trust. That has not stopped. What has changed is what happens before the asking.
A procurement lead or a property manager researching a purchase now runs a first pass through a chat tool, because it is faster than reading ten websites. The output is a short list of named companies with a sentence about each. That list becomes the starting point, and everything after it is qualification.
Here is the part that matters for a local supplier. The tool is assembling an answer from text it has read, rather than ranking you against competitors on quality. If it has read four companies that clearly state they do commercial electrical work in Port Coquitlam, it names those four. A fifth company that does the same work but describes itself as a full-service solutions provider does not enter the answer, because there is nothing to match.
Being good at the work is a separate question from being findable, and the second one is what is broken.
Why Tri-Cities suppliers are invisible in those answers
The Tri-Cities have a real industrial and trades base. The corridor along United Boulevard and the Mary Hill Bypass is where a lot of that sits: distribution, fabrication, equipment, service companies. Coquitlam Centre anchors the retail and office side. Port Moody's Moody Centre has been filling in with smaller offices and professional firms alongside its older industrial character. The Evergreen Extension, open since December 2016, put SkyTrain into Coquitlam and Port Moody and made the whole area easier to reach for staff and clients coming from Burnaby and Vancouver.
So there is no shortage of B2B activity here. The gap is in what these companies publish.
Three patterns show up constantly:
- One page for everything. A services page listing eight things in a bulleted list, with a paragraph of general text above it. A buyer looking for one specific service finds a list, not an answer.
- No geography anywhere. The site says Metro Vancouver, or says nothing. A buyer in Port Coquitlam has no way to know you work there, and neither does a machine trying to answer a question about Port Coquitlam.
- Industry language instead of buyer language. Companies write the way they talk internally. Buyers search the way they think. Those are different vocabularies and only one of them gets typed into a search box.
None of this requires a rebuild. It requires writing down what you already do, in plain words, on pages that exist.
Name the work you actually do
Take the two services that generate the most revenue. Give each one its own page. Then answer these on the page, in this order:
- What the service is, named the way a buyer would say it out loud.
- Who it is for. Strata buildings, warehouses, retail fit-outs, food processing, offices. Be specific about the environments you are comfortable in.
- Where you do it. Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, and whatever else you cover. Say the municipality names.
- How it works. The steps from first call to finished job, including how quickly you respond and what a site visit involves.
- What is included and what is not. The exclusions build more trust than the inclusions do.
That structure works for search and it works for AI retrieval, for the same reason: it puts a clear statement next to the words a buyer used. It also does something more immediately useful. It answers the questions your office would otherwise field on a phone call.
If you want the wider version of how this content gets picked up by AI tools, the GEO for SMBs guide covers the mechanics.
Proof a careful buyer can check
Commercial buyers qualify before they call, and many of them have to justify the choice to somebody else. That second part is what most suppliers forget.
Give them something forwardable. One page per notable job: the building type, the scope, the constraint that made it interesting, and how long it took. No numbers you cannot support. A short, honest write-up of a warehouse retrofit is worth more than a gallery of photos with no captions.
Then collect reviews from business clients specifically. A facilities manager reads other facilities managers. Five reviews from commercial customers that mention the type of building carry more weight for this buyer than fifty residential reviews, and they also give search engines and AI tools text that connects your name to commercial work in a named city.
Ask every time a job closes well. Send a direct link by text within a day. That habit beats any clever tactic, and the Google Business Profile playbook for BC service businesses covers the setup around it.
One more thing worth publishing: your service area, written out. A page or a clear block that names Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, and the neighbouring areas you cover removes an assumption a buyer would otherwise have to make. Plenty of firms based near United Boulevard serve the whole Fraser Valley and never say so anywhere on their site, so a buyer in Port Moody quietly assumes they are a Coquitlam-only shop and moves on.
The local signals that still decide local search
Before anything sophisticated, finish the free work.
Claim the Google Business Profile. Pick the correct primary category. List every service. Set the service area to the municipalities you actually cover. Write a description that says what you do and where. Upload real photos of completed work, your team, and your vehicles. Keep the hours current.
This takes an afternoon and most of your competitors have not done it properly. It feeds the map pack, it feeds the panel that shows when someone searches your company name, and it is a structured statement about your business that both Google and the AI tools read.
Then check the basics on the site itself. Address and phone number in the footer on every page. A contact form that works on a phone. Page titles that name the service and the city. These are unglamorous and they decide more outcomes than most campaigns do.
Where AI helps a company with no marketing person
Most Tri-Cities suppliers have thin websites for a simple reason. The owner is running jobs and there is nobody whose job is writing.
That constraint has loosened. ChatGPT or Claude can take your rough notes about a completed job and turn them into a readable case study in ten minutes. It can draft a service page from a conversation. It can rewrite an industry-jargon paragraph into something a property manager understands. It can produce the follow-up message that recovers a quote nobody chased.
Two rules keep this useful. Check every fact yourself, because the tool will invent a detail if you let it. And make it sound like you, which usually means cutting the adjectives it adds and putting back the way you actually talk.
Once a month, run the check that matters. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode for suppliers in your category in Coquitlam and in Port Coquitlam. Write down which companies get named. That list is your competitive set in the channel that is quietly deciding who gets called, and it will tell you within a quarter whether the content work is landing.
Answer the questions your office keeps answering
Listen to the phone for a week and write down what people ask before they commit. How fast can you get here. Do you work on that type of building. Are you insured for that. What does a site visit cost. Can you work after hours. Who is the actual contact.
Those questions are your content plan, already written by your customers. Put each answer on the site in plain words. Not buried in a policies page, on the service page where the question comes up.
This does two things at once. It saves your office the same call twenty times a month, and it gives search engines and AI tools direct, specific text to pull from. A page that plainly says a same-day site visit within the Tri-Cities is possible, and states what happens next, is the kind of statement that gets quoted back to a buyer who asked a machine.
Marcus Sheridan built a whole approach around this idea, and it holds up: answer the questions buyers actually ask, including the awkward ones about cost and limitations. Companies avoid publishing those answers because they think it invites price shopping. What it really does is remove your competitors from the conversation, because they said nothing.
The takeaway
The Tri-Cities market did not get harder. The first step of the buying process moved somewhere you are not published.
Write real pages for the services you sell. Name the municipalities. Publish proof a buyer can forward. Finish the Google Business Profile and keep asking for reviews. That is the whole list, and it is dull enough that most of your competitors will skip it.
Get named in the answer. Everything else is qualification. If you want to talk through how this applies to your Tri-Cities business, start the conversation here.