Research status: collection is being completed
The methodology and data contract are live. The publication job requires at least 100 successfully audited, deduplicated business websites before it will replace this pending state with aggregate findings.
No fabricated benchmark numbers
The report does not publish invented percentages while collection is incomplete. Findings are generated directly from the committed raw dataset.
Sample design and reproducibility
The sample is drawn from public Vancouver Local by Names and Numbers category listings. A candidate needs an external business website and a concrete address containing the municipality being sampled. Broad “serving Metro Vancouver” listings and directory spillover results are not enough on their own.
| Sampling rule | Method |
|---|---|
| Source | Vancouver Local by Names and Numbers public category listings |
| Geography | Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Coquitlam, Delta, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam are queried where category listings are available. |
| Industry mix | Plumbing, dentistry, roofing, accounting and legal-services directory categories are queried to avoid a single-sector sample. |
| Business website | The directory listing must expose an external public website; social profiles and directory URLs are excluded. |
| One hostname per sample | Duplicate website hostnames are removed before the balanced audit pool is created. |
| Successful homepage | Only websites whose checked homepage returns HTML successfully enter the final 100-row sample. |
| Collection period | Recorded automatically when the research runner completes. |
Discovery itself is reproducible from the public source pages, but directory contents and business websites change over time. A later rerun may therefore produce a different valid sample.
View the public discovery source ↗The true 100-point observable scoring model
The report and the System Current Website & Enquiry Checker now use the same weights. A point is awarded only when the signal is observed in public HTML or at the conventional endpoint.
| Signal | Points | Why it is included |
|---|---|---|
| HTTPS | 8 | Encrypted delivery of the final checked homepage. |
| Mobile viewport | 8 | Basic mobile rendering signal. |
| Page title | 6 | Core page identity for browsers and search results. |
| Meta description | 6 | A substantive search-result description signal. |
| Canonical URL | 5 | Preferred-URL declaration. |
| HTML form | 10 | Observable path for structured customer input. |
| Clickable phone | 7 | Direct mobile calling path where exposed. |
| Clickable email | 5 | Direct email path. |
| Contact / action language | 7 | Evidence of an obvious next customer action. |
| Quote / consultation language | 7 | Evidence of an explicit commercial enquiry path. |
| JSON-LD structured data | 9 | Machine-readable entity or page information. |
| Open Graph metadata | 5 | Basic social sharing metadata. |
| H1 heading | 5 | Observable primary heading structure. |
| robots.txt | 6 | Conventional crawler-control endpoint. |
| sitemap.xml | 6 | Conventional sitemap endpoint. |
Important limitation
A site can score 100 and still have weak positioning, poor proof or low search authority. A lower score can also be appropriate when a business deliberately does not publish a phone number, email link or public quote form.
What this research cannot conclude
- It cannot prove that a contact form successfully delivers to a person, inbox or CRM.
- It cannot infer conversion rate, lead quality, revenue impact or customer satisfaction.
- It cannot determine Google rankings or local-pack visibility without search-performance data.
- It does not establish full accessibility conformance, security posture or Core Web Vitals from the homepage HTML check.
- JavaScript-rendered or bot-protected content may not be visible to the lightweight collector.
- The directory-derived sample is not a random census of all Metro Vancouver businesses and should not be generalized as one.
- City and industry subgroup averages are contextual descriptors, not evidence that one municipality or industry has better businesses or websites overall.
Download, cite or reuse the research
The point of publishing the raw evidence is to make the headline findings auditable. Journalists, business organizations, agencies and researchers can reference the aggregate findings with attribution to System Current and a link to this report.