We Counted the Google Reviews of 314 Okanagan Trades. Vernon Is 3x Behind Kelowna.

Every local SEO page in this valley says some version of the same sentence. Most Okanagan businesses are under-indexed online. The competition is weaker than you think. Vernon is easier to rank in than Kelowna. It is on half the agency websites between here and Penticton, and not one of them publishes a number behind it.

So on August 7, 2026 we went and counted.

We pulled the Google Business Profiles that Google surfaces for twelve home service trades across Vernon and Kelowna, filtered them down to businesses actually located in those two cities, and counted their reviews. Three hundred and fourteen businesses. The gap we found was wider than we expected, and it is not the gap most people assume.

What We Measured, and What We Did Not

The method matters more than usual here, because the entire point of this post is that somebody finally showed their work.

We queried the Google Places API for twelve trades in each city: roofing, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, landscaping, general contracting, painting, flooring, window installation, concrete, gutters, and home renovation. We kept only businesses whose listed address is genuinely in Vernon or Kelowna, so a Kelowna company appearing in a Vernon search does not get counted as a Vernon business. We removed suppliers and retailers, because a building materials store is not competing with you for a re-roof. We kept only profiles marked as operational. That left 314 businesses: 131 in Vernon and 183 in Kelowna.

Four limits, stated plainly, because a number without its limits is just a marketing claim:

• This is a census of review volume, not a ranking study. We counted what sits on the profiles. We did not measure who ranks where, and nothing below should be read as proof that reviews caused a ranking.
• Search results are not the map pack. What we sampled is the set of businesses Google surfaces for each trade query, which is a good picture of the competitive field but is not the three pack itself.
• We report medians, not averages, and the difference is the whole story. One Vernon firm carries 2,825 reviews on its own. That single business pulls Vernon's average up to 62 while the actual middle of the field sits at 12. Averages in a market like this tell you about the outlier. Medians tell you about your competition.
• We could not measure review velocity. How fast a business earns new reviews is arguably more important than the total, and this data cannot see it.

Vernon's Median Trades Business Has 12 Google Reviews. Kelowna's Has 37.

Here is the whole sample, side by side.

Read the last row again, because it is the one that changes what this post is about.

The average star rating in the two cities is 4.80 and 4.85. That is a rounding error. Vernon trades are not doing worse work. Their customers are not less happy. There are simply three times fewer people on the public record saying so.

That is a documentation gap, not a quality gap, and the distinction matters because one of those is fixable inside a quarter. Forty two percent of Vernon trades businesses are sitting under ten reviews. Nearly seven in ten are under twenty five. Every one of the six businesses in the entire sample with no reviews at all was in Vernon.

The Gap Shows Up in Nine Trades Out of Eleven

A single citywide number can hide a lot, so we broke it down by trade. These are median review counts, and we only show trades where both cities returned a usable sample.

HVAC is the widest by a distance. The middle of the Kelowna HVAC field carries 164 reviews. The middle of the Vernon field carries seven. Painting is the same story at a smaller scale, six against thirty three.

Concrete and flooring are the useful exceptions. Those two are effectively level between the cities, and that is how we know the pattern is real rather than an artifact of how we sampled. If our method were simply flattering Kelowna, every row would lean the same way. Two of them do not.

Why 25 Reviews at 4.9 Stars Loses to 120 Reviews at 4.7

Review signals are consistently ranked among the heaviest factors in the local pack in Whitespark's annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey, which polls local SEO practitioners on what actually moves listings. Count, recency, and rating all feed into it.

But reviews do two separate jobs, and the second one is the job most business owners underrate.

The first job is ranking. That one is contested and partial, and we want to be straight about it. Reviews alone do not decide the map pack. Proximity to the person searching is enormously powerful, category and service relevance matter, and a well filled profile with a matching website behind it matters too. You can have the most reviews in your trade and still lose a search to a competitor who is four kilometres closer to the person holding the phone. Anyone who tells you reviews are the whole game is selling review software.

The second job is what happens after you rank, and it is not contested at all. A homeowner who searches for a roofer sees three profiles. They have never heard of any of you. Before they read a single word of a review, they read two numbers: the stars and the count in brackets beside them. Four point nine stars from 25 people and four point seven stars from 120 people are not read as a rating comparison. They are read as a risk comparison. The second business looks established. The first looks like a maybe.

This is why the star rating parity in our data is so double edged. Vernon businesses have earned the ratings. They have not collected the volume that makes a stranger believe the rating.

What This Means If You Are in Vernon Quoting Kelowna Jobs

The drive between Vernon and Kelowna is about forty five minutes, and plenty of trades work both ends of it. If that is you, this data cuts in two directions at once.

Going south is harder than it looks. When you quote a Kelowna job you are landing in front of a homeowner whose other two quotes come from businesses where the middle of the field carries 37 reviews. You are not being compared to the Vernon market you know. If your profile is sitting at 12 reviews, you are the least documented option on the list before anyone has read your price. That is a fixable problem, but only if you know it is happening.

Going north is the opportunity, and it is a real one. Nearly seven in ten Vernon trades businesses are under 25 reviews. That is a soft field. In a market where the median competitor has 12 reviews, going from 12 to 40 does not move you up a little. It moves you past most of the businesses you are competing with, and it costs you nothing but the discipline of asking. Vernon is genuinely the cheaper market to win. Kelowna is the one you have to earn.

We wrote separately about what that work costs in this valley in our honest guide to SEO pricing in Kelowna, and we keep dedicated pages for both markets if you want the local specifics for Vernon and Kelowna.

The Three Fixes, in the Order They Actually Pay

Nothing here is clever. It is the boring version, ordered by what returns the most for the least effort.

1. Close the review gap with a system, not a mood

The businesses at the top of these tables are almost never the ones with the best marketing. They are the ones that ask every single time, in the same way, at the same moment in the job. The gap you are closing is to the median of your trade in your city, taken straight from the table above, not to whoever leads your category. We have covered the mechanics of the ask in detail in our guide on how to get more Google reviews, so we will not repeat it here. The short version is that a request sent within an hour of finishing the work outperforms anything you send a week later.

2. Put a real website link on the profile

Ten point seven percent of Vernon profiles in our sample had no website linked at all. That is one in nine businesses paying for a listing that dead ends. If you have a site, link it. If the link goes to a page that does not match the service the customer just searched for, fix that next.

3. Fill the fields almost nobody fills

Categories and services are where most Okanagan profiles are thinnest, and they are free. Your primary category is the single most consequential field on the whole profile, and the services list underneath it is how Google learns which searches you belong in. This is the bulk of what our local SEO service does in the first month, and it is also entirely doable yourself in an afternoon if you would rather. Our full walkthrough of the ranking factors is in how to rank in the Google Map Pack.

Where to Start This Week

You do not need our dataset to act on this. You need twenty minutes and your own eyes.

1. Search your trade and your city the way a customer would. Use an incognito window so your own history does not flatter the result.
2. Write down the review count of the three businesses that appear above you.
3. Write down yours.
4. Subtract. That number is your backlog, and it is the only marketing metric on this page you control completely.

Then compare your number to the median for your trade in the table above. If you are below it, you have found the cheapest available improvement to your local visibility. If you are above it and still not getting calls, the problem is somewhere else, and it is worth finding out where before you spend another dollar.

If you would rather have someone run that comparison properly, that is what our free SEO audit is. We will pull your profile against the businesses actually beating you for your trade in your city and send you what we find. If your profile is already in good shape, we will tell you that too.

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