How Do Electricians Actually Rank in the Metro Vancouver Google Map Pack Right Now?

Rankwise Lab — Market Study · July 2026

This is a Rankwise Lab Market Study — public Google search data, observed and analyzed by Rankwise, not client results. Rankwise does not have electrician clients and does not claim to have caused anything you're about to read.

Abstract

Across 216 electrician searches in 18 Metro Vancouver cities, no single business owns the field: Kato Electrical Inc. led with just 13 appearances, and 204 different businesses showed up at least once. What separates the ones that appear again and again from the ones that don't is review volume: across 557 tracked appearances where review counts were available, businesses with 50 or more reviews took 319, while those under 20 reviews took only 99, just 18% of the field. If your listing sits under 20 reviews today, the data says you're getting 18% of the visibility the top group is pulling. One outlier worth knowing: for "EV charger installation," Google returned zero electricians across all 18 cities — every one of the 54 top-three slots went to charging infrastructure like Tesla Supercharger and BC Hydro, not the people who install chargers.

1. The question

No single business dominates the Metro Vancouver electrician Map Pack — review volume is what shapes who shows up. That's the direct answer. The reason it matters is simpler than search algorithms: an electrician running a small shop just wants to know whether the phone rings. This study asks it directly: when a homeowner in Coquitlam, Chilliwack, or Vancouver searches for an electrician, whose business actually shows up, how many reviews does it take to be in that group, and does the answer change depending on what the homeowner is searching for. That last point turns out to matter more than expected.

2. How this was measured

This study pulls from 216 keyword searches collected and stored in Rankwise's Supabase database, generated 2026-07-09, covering 8 electrical service terms — electrician, emergency electrician, electrical repair, electrical panel upgrade, electrical inspection, wiring installation, outlet installation, ceiling fan installation, lighting installation, knob and tube rewiring, and generator installation, plus EV charger installation — searched across 18 Metro Vancouver cities. The search location for the pull was Langley, British Columbia. Data collection used SerpAPI against live Google Maps results — the same public map results a homeowner would see, not a private index or survey. Each of the 216 searches can surface more than one Map Pack result, but not every result carries a visible review count on Google — 557 tracked appearances did, and every appearance-count and review-tier figure in this study is drawn from that 557, not from all 216 searches or from the full set of Map Pack results those searches returned.

Limits, stated upfront: this is one search location on one day. A homeowner searching from Surrey or White Rock may see a different top three than a search run from Langley. There is no click data, no call data, and no way to know whether appearing in these results correlates with actual jobs booked. 204 distinct competitors appear across the dataset — some once, some repeatedly — and a single appearance carries far less weight than a pattern across a dozen searches. Where a listing's numbers don't resolve to one clean figure below, that's either flagged in place or excluded and footnoted — never smoothed over.

3. Findings

How concentrated is the electrician Map Pack in Metro Vancouver?

Out of 204 distinct competitors tracked, most appear once. A smaller group shows up again and again. Kato Electrical Inc. leads with 13 appearances (Vancouver and Burnaby, average rating 4.9, reviews ranging 190–313). Huntley Electrical, Universal Electrical Services, and StefWest Electrical Systems Ltd. each appear 11 times, tightly bound to a single city — Chilliwack for the first two, Port Moody for the third.

A seventh business, Alex Electrician & Handyman Services (11/216 appearances, 5.0 average rating), was tracked but is excluded from this table because its city and review-range data were incomplete at collection time.

N = 216 keyword searches. Source: Google Maps search results, Langley BC search location, generated 2026-07-09.

One row in the table above carries a flag worth naming rather than hiding. Kato Electrical Inc. appears to operate more than one Google Business Profile listing — including a distinct listing named "Electrician Port Coquitlam - Kato Electrical Inc." (see the Port Coquitlam finding below) — so its 13 appearances are the combined total across listings, not one listing's tally, and its review count varies between 190 and 313 depending on which listing Google returned for a given search.

Beyond that, two things stand out. First, dominance is local, not regional — Universal Electrical Services owns Chilliwack, not the whole Fraser Valley. Second, a 5.0 rating shows up constantly at this frequency level; rating alone doesn't separate the top group from anyone else.

How many reviews does it take to show up?

Across 557 tracked appearances where review counts were available, counts range from 1 to 776, with a median of 63. Of those 557, businesses with 50 or more reviews account for 319 appearances, and businesses with fewer than 20 reviews account for 99, or 18% of the field.

N = 557 appearances where review counts were available. Source: Google Maps search results, generated 2026-07-09.

The middle band — 20 to 49 reviews — is the smallest of the three at 139 appearances. That's a real gap, not a smooth curve: a business tends to move from the low-review group into the 50+ group faster than it lingers in the middle.

Which cities carry the most weight in this data?

Named-city appearances aren't evenly spread. Port Coquitlam (42), Maple Ridge (41), and North Vancouver (38) lead the tracked cities, followed closely by Chilliwack (30), New Westminster (30), Vancouver (30), Port Moody (29), and Langley (28). Surrey (22), Delta (21), Richmond (21), West Vancouver (19), White Rock (16), Coquitlam (13), and Pitt Meadows (8) round out the list. A further 96 appearances came from businesses addressed outside the named set ("Other") and 50 could not be attributed to a specific city from the listing data.

N = 216 keyword searches, 204 tracked competitors. Source: Google Maps search results, generated 2026-07-09.

Port Coquitlam and Maple Ridge topping this list is notable — they're smaller markets than Vancouver or Surrey but generated more tracked appearances, likely because a small number of local businesses (Intel Power Electric Ltd., Electrician Port Coquitlam - Kato Electrical Inc., Elpro Electric) hold ground across nearly every service keyword searched in their city.

Do "EV charger installation" searches actually surface electricians?

No — not once. Across all 18 cities searched for "EV charger installation," the top three results were exclusively charging stations and EV infrastructure: Tesla Supercharger, BC Hydro Charging Station, Shell Recharge, FLO Charging Station, ChargePoint, SWTCH, and similar. Not a single electrician or contractor business appeared in any of the 54 tracked slots for this term.

N = 54 slots (18 cities x top 3 results). Source: Google Maps search results, generated 2026-07-09.

Google appears to be reading "EV charger installation" as a navigational search for a place to charge a car, not a service search for someone to install a charger at home. Every other electrical service term in this dataset — panel upgrades, wiring, repair, generator installation — reliably surfaced electrician businesses. This one term is the outlier — a service search that currently routes to charging infrastructure, not to the people who install it.

4. What this means for an electrician trying to show up on Google

• Fewer than 20 reviews puts a business in the smallest tracked group today — not a dead end. The numbers show the path: 99 appearances sit under 20 reviews, 139 in the 20–49 tier, and 319 at 50 or more. If that's where your listing sits now, the pattern in this data points toward the next tier.
• The jump from "under 20" to "50+" seems to matter more than the climb from 50 to 100. The 20–49 tier is the thinnest band in the data — 139 appearances against 319 at 50+. Businesses don't sit there long; they either stay under 20 or push past 50.
• A 5.0 rating is table stakes, not an edge. Nearly every business with double-digit appearances in this dataset sits at 4.9 or 5.0. Rating won't separate you from the pack — review volume and consistency across service pages will.
• Frequency beats a single strong keyword. The businesses with the most appearances — Kato Electrical, Huntley Electrical, StefWest — show up across multiple electrical service terms in their city, not just one. A profile built around a single service page is competing at a structural disadvantage against one built across several.
• If you install EV chargers, don't expect the Map Pack to send you that customer directly. Right now, Google is answering "EV charger installation" with a map of places to plug in, not a list of people who can wire one into a garage. That's a search-behaviour gap worth knowing about before betting content strategy on that exact phrase.

5. Limitations

This is a single-day pull from a single search location (Langley). Google's Map Pack is known to vary by the searcher's physical location, meaning a homeowner searching from White Rock or North Vancouver may see a materially different top three than what's captured here. There is no click, call, or conversion data attached to any of these appearances — visibility in the top three is not the same as getting hired. This study makes no before/after comparison and can't say whether any business's position is rising, falling, or holding steady; that requires repeated pulls over time. Sample sizes vary widely by city — Pitt Meadows has 8 tracked appearances against Port Coquitlam's 42, so city-level comparisons should be read as directional, not precise. Review recency, response rate, and photo activity are not part of this dataset and are not claimed as findings here.

6. What Rankwise tracks from here

Rankwise Lab studies how local businesses show up on Google Maps across a range of trades in Metro Vancouver — this is one entry in that ongoing series. Future pulls on this same keyword set will show whether the top group holds its ground, whether the EV charger installation gap closes, and whether the review-tier pattern here repeats elsewhere. If you want to see how your own business and category look on Google right now, book a 15-minute visibility check at rankwise.ca/audit.

References

1. Google Maps search results (public), collected via SerpAPI, search location Langley, British Columbia, Canada — generated 2026-07-09.
2. Rankwise Supabase serp_snapshots table — 216 keyword records, keyword-set: electrician, latest snapshot per keyword.
3. Aggregation and city attribution performed on the snapshot set; figures reported as ranges and counts, anonymized at the individual-business level.
4. City attribution inferred from business address as listed on each Google Maps profile; "Other" and "Unknown" categories reflect addresses outside the 18 named cities or unlisted addresses respectively.