VanCityGuide
A hyperlocal guide to Greater Vancouver for newcomers and visitors — built around real neighborhood data, cost-of-living research, and the everyday questions people actually ask before relocating.
Problem
People relocating to or visiting Vancouver have to stitch together info from outdated forums, generic relocation sites, and agency-owned lifestyle blogs. None of them give honest, current numbers for what living in a specific neighborhood actually costs or feels like.
Approach
VanCityGuide is built as a content-first site organized around the questions newcomers actually search for, not generic city-marketing copy. Each page targets a specific intent — a neighborhood, a cost category, a newcomer task — and gives a direct answer.
- Neighborhood breakdowns with real cost-of-living data
- Newcomer essentials: housing, transit, healthcare, taxes
- Local service prices for groceries, utilities, and lifestyle
- Events and seasonal activity guides
- Mobile-first reading experience for on-the-go research
- Schema markup for local content discoverability
Build
Next.js for static rendering and per-page SEO control, Tailwind for fast iteration, and a content pipeline that lets new neighborhood and service pages ship in minutes instead of hours. Designed for fast page loads on mobile, where most newcomer research happens.
Strategy
The growth model is long-tail organic search — capturing very specific queries ("cost of living Kitsilano vs Mount Pleasant", "moving to Vancouver from Toronto checklist") where generic city sites don't compete. Each page is structured to answer one question well rather than chasing high-volume head terms.