Furnace Searches Peak in January, Not October. We Pulled 23 Months of Okanagan Search Data for 18 Trades.

Ask a heating contractor in Vernon when furnace season starts and you will hear October. That is when the tune-up flyers go out, when the fall promo runs, when the phone is supposed to start ringing. It is a reasonable guess. It is also, according to Google's own numbers for this valley, about three months early. Okanagan homeowners search for furnace help most in January, and in both of the winters we can see, January had roughly twice the furnace searches of October.

That was the first surprise. There were several more, so we built the whole calendar: 18 trades, 73 keywords, 10 towns, 23 months. Here is what it says, what it does not say, and what to do about it starting this week.

What We Measured, and What We Did Not

The data is Google's own. Through the Google Ads API we pulled monthly search volumes from Keyword Planner for 73 trade keywords (things like "plumber near me" and "gutter cleaning"), grouped into 18 trades, with the location set to 10 Okanagan municipalities: Vernon, Coldstream, Armstrong and Enderby in the north; Kelowna, West Kelowna, Lake Country and Peachland in the centre; Penticton and Summerland in the south. Google returned 23 months, September 2024 through July 2026. August 2026 was not published yet when we pulled.

Four honest limits, because a calendar without its caveats is just a slogan:

• Google rounds. Keyword Planner does not report 47 searches; it reports 50 or 40, and the buckets widen as the numbers grow. Summing 73 keywords across 10 towns smooths that out, but treat the ratios in this post as solid and any single number as indicative. Google's own explanation of these metrics says the same.
• This is Google Search, not the phone. Search volume tells you when strangers look, not when your phone rings. Referral work, repeat customers and insurance jobs never touch Google. This calendar times the stranger channel, which is the one you pay for.
• We removed 13 single-month spikes that did not repeat. "General contractor" logged 880 searches in January 2025 against a normal month of 70; January 2026 came in at 70. "Roofing companies" did the same in January 2026 (320 against a normal 50). We could not find a storm or cold snap to explain them, so they are out of the seasonal averages and kept in the raw file. The rule was mechanical: more than four times the keyword's median, and not repeated in the same month of the other year.
• One keyword was thrown out entirely. "Deck builders" came back with a zero-dollar cost per click and a thousand searches a month from September to December 2025. That is not deck demand. That is a video game genre. A number you have not looked at is not yet a finding.

Everything below uses the calendar-month average across the months we have, with those exclusions applied.

Spring Is the Peak, December Is the Floor, and the Valley Roughly Doubles Between Them

Add all 18 trades together and the Okanagan's year has a simple shape. March runs 24 percent above the average month and December runs 28 percent below it. March 2025 was the single biggest month of that year at 8,060 searches; in 2026 the biggest month so far is May at 6,630. December was the smallest month in both years we have (4,940 in 2024, 3,390 in 2025), and November was the second smallest in both.

The climb out is steep. From December 2024 to March 2025 total searches rose 63 percent. From December 2025 to March 2026 they rose 84 percent. Whatever else is true of your trade, the valley as a whole roughly doubles its interest in hiring someone between the week after Christmas and the first warm weekend.

One thing we expected to find and did not: a September bounce. Valley-wide, August 2025 to September 2025 went from 5,070 to 5,150, a 2 percent change, which is inside the rounding. Fall is not a second spring. Fall is flat, and then November and December fall off. We will come back to the one part of the valley where September does move.

Furnace Searches Peak in January, Not October: The Trade-by-Trade Calendar

Here is the table. "Ads on by" is the busiest month minus six weeks, which is roughly how long a Google Ads campaign needs to learn who clicks before the volume arrives.

Some of this matches the gut. Air conditioning peaks in June and July (1,830 and 1,900 searches in June and July 2026 against 300 in December). Snow removal peaks in November at 5.2 times its summer low. Pressure washing is a spring trade, 870 searches in April against 160 in December.

Some of it does not match the gut. These are the rows worth a closer look:

• Heating peaks in January, not October. January 2025: 890 furnace searches. October 2024: 440. January 2026: 440. October 2025: 190. The pattern is a breakdown curve, not a pre-season curve. Homeowners do not search "furnace repair" when the flyer arrives. They search it when the house is cold. The June low is 130 against a January peak of 560, a 4.3 times swing.
• Roofing peaks in September. In both years, September was the top roofing month, 200 in 2024 and 400 in 2025 after the spike rule, against 180 in August and 250 in October 2025. The quiet month is January. If you are a roofer reading this in the first week of September, this is your month, and your ads should already be on.
• Landscaping and tree work peak in March, before anything is green. Landscaping: 670 in March 2025 and 530 in March 2026, down to 180 by October 2025. Tree service: 390 and 350 in the same two Marches. The homeowner is planning in March. By the time the lawn needs cutting, they have hired.
• Gutters have two seasons. The big one is November, the second is May, and January runs at about a third of the fall level.
• Christmas lights are an October search. The November peak is 25 times the March floor, but look at October: 100 against 150 in 2024, 80 against 100 in 2025. At least two thirds of the peak arrives a month before the peak. The person searching in October is booking the November job.

Two Trades Have No Off-Season, and Five Swing Four Times or More

The most useful column in that table is busiest divided by quietest. It tells you whether you have a season at all.

Plumbing and electrical do not. Plumbing averages 1,179 searches a month, the most of any trade in the valley, and its quietest month (December) still runs at 850, a 1.7 times swing. Electrical is flatter still at 1.6 times on 551 a month. A plumber or electrician who pauses ads in winter is not saving a slow season. They are handing three months of steady demand, and the valley's most expensive clicks, to whoever kept the campaign on.

At the other end, five trades swing four times or more: Christmas lights, pressure washing, snow removal, heating, decks & fences. There the off-season is real, money spent in it mostly buys nothing, and the right move is to spend it on the things that take months to pay: reviews, the website, the service pages you want ranking when the season opens. Our post on what to do when you are booked solid made that argument in general. This is what it looks like with your trade's numbers on it.

The middle of the table, painting at 3.0 times, cooling at 2.8 times, roofing at 2.5 times, is where most contractors live. You have a season, but the off-season is not empty. Budget down, do not switch off.

Kelowna Is 65 Percent of the Valley's Searches, and Vernon's Year Is Flatter

We pulled the three parts of the valley separately as well. In the twelve months to July 2026, the Central Okanagan (Kelowna, West Kelowna, Lake Country, Peachland) accounted for 47,040 searches across our keywords, the North Okanagan (Vernon, Coldstream, Armstrong, Enderby) for 14,370, and the South (Penticton, Summerland) for 10,650. That is 65, 20 and 15 percent. Google rounds each pull separately, so the three do not add up exactly to the valley-wide figure; we use them for shares only.

Two differences matter if you work out of Vernon. First, the September bounce that does not exist valley-wide does exist in Kelowna: August to September 2025 was up 30 percent in the Central Okanagan, flat in the north (0 percent) and down 11 percent in the south. Second, Vernon's year is flatter. December to March, the north climbed 62 percent against 84 percent in the centre. Kelowna is bigger and more seasonal. Vernon is smaller and steadier, a better shape for a modest, always-on campaign than for a big spring push.

We found earlier that a Vernon contractor effectively cannot rank in Kelowna. This is the other half of that finding: the two markets do not just rank separately, they search on different calendars.

What a Click Costs in the Okanagan, Trade by Trade

Keyword Planner also reports what it takes to bid for the top of the page. This is the range per trade (median of the trade's keywords) plus its priciest keyword.

The spread is the story. "emergency plumber" tops out at $97 a click and "electrician near me" at $88, while a landscaping click tops out around $16 and a tree service click around $13. Put that next to the calendar and the strategy writes itself. The flat, expensive trades (plumbing, electrical, heating and cooling) should run all year with a budget that flexes, because every restart re-buys the learning at the valley's highest prices. The seasonal, cheap trades (landscaping, pressure washing, painting, tree work) can go hard in a short window, because the window is sharp and the clicks are cheap.

A caution: top-of-page bids are Google's estimate of what it takes to be first, not what you will pay on average, and the cost of a lead depends far more on your landing page than on the bid. We covered why cost per lead has been rising separately, and our Google Ads management page shows how we run these accounts.

Fewer Searches Than a Year Ago, With One Exception

Because we have two overlapping periods, we can compare them. September 2024 to July 2025 against September 2025 to July 2026, the same eleven months a year apart: total searches across all 18 trades were down 11 percent, and 13 of the 18 trades searched less. The one large exception is roofing, up 74 percent on the raw numbers, though most of that is the two spike months we could not explain.

We would not build a story on it. Keyword Planner rounds and revises its history, and a year-on-year move inside ten percent is noise here. A valley-wide drop of 11 percent is probably real, and probably mostly homeowners getting a first answer from an AI summary and clicking less. It does not change the calendar. It does mean the searches that are left are worth more, because more of the casual ones have gone.

The Six-Week Rule: How to Spend Against This Calendar, Starting This Week

Everything above reduces to one rule and a few dates. The rule: demand for the stranger channel arrives on the calendar, not when you start spending, so the ads go on six weeks before the peak and the pages go up three months before it. Here is what that means if you are reading this in the first week of September.

1. Gutters, snow removal, Christmas lights, furnace work: your window opens in four to eight weeks. October is the on-switch for gutters and lights, November for snow, and furnace searches climb from December into the January peak. If the campaign is not built, build it now. If the service page does not exist, it will not rank in time for this season; write it anyway for next year.
2. Roofing: September is your biggest month. Be visible. This is not the month to be testing a new website or letting the ad account run out of budget on the twentieth.
3. Landscaping, pressure washing, painting, concrete: you have about six weeks of season left. Let the campaign run it out, then put the December to February money into reviews and the pages you want ranking in March. Our local SEO work for Okanagan trades is mostly this: building in the quiet months so the busy months arrive pre-sold.
4. Plumbing, electrical, HVAC: do nothing dramatic. Keep the campaign on, flex the budget with the table, and spend the winter on conversion rate. At the valley's highest click prices, a page that converts one visitor in ten instead of one in twenty halves your cost per job.
5. Everyone: December is the build month. It is the floor of the valley's year and the quietest month for nine of the 18 trades in the table, so the site rebuild, the review push, the new service pages and the Google Business Profile clean-up cost you the least in missed calls. Our Kelowna and Vernon pages describe what that looks like town by town.

The calendar is not complicated. What is rare is a contractor who runs their spending against it instead of against their own busy season, which, as the heating row shows, can be three months out from when the homeowner is looking. The numbers for your own trade and towns are a phone call away, and the free audit will tell you whether your pages are ready for the month that matters.

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