Creston, BC · Serving the Kootenays & Canada-Wide
Websites, local SEO and Meta ads for visual trades — built so the machine doing the recommending can actually read you, and so an enquiry lands on your phone in seconds rather than an inbox on Sunday.
Built for the AI Machine,
Not Just the Customer
Five years ago a trade's website was a brochure nobody read, and skipping it cost you almost nothing. That has quietly stopped being true — not because customers started reading websites again, but because they stopped being the ones reading.
Forty-five percent of people now use AI to find local services. They do not get ten blue links, they get two or three names. And a site that looks expensive but carries no schema, no structured answers and no machine-readable location data is invisible to that process — which is how a trade with a plainer website ends up beating you.
Bigsky Creative is run by Shawn Bourque out of Creston, and it builds the readable layer as well as the pretty one: a real page for every town you serve, the schema and llms.txt an answer engine needs to quote you, lead capture that reaches your phone in seconds, and an email list that stays yours no matter what a platform decides next.
Visual Trades,
Local Markets
Trades where the work photographs well, the customer is within driving distance, and the job is quoted rather than priced off a shelf. That is where this system does its best work — and if yours is not on the list, there is a page for that too.
The highest-ticket trade on this list and the longest sales cycle. Someone pricing a 40×60 shop is comparing quotes for weeks — the job is to be the one they can find, read and trust throughout.
A visual trade with a brutal season. Everyone wants a deck in May and nobody is thinking about it in November — so the work is filling spring early and finding something to sell in the shoulder months.
Three different customers wearing the same label — the homeowner doing sixty feet, the farm doing a mile, and the commercial contractor. They search differently and they need different pages.
Half planned work and half emergency, and the emergency half is won entirely on speed. When a tree comes down in a storm, nobody scrolls to the fourth result.
The niche this whole system was built in. Detailing is treated as a word-of-mouth business right up until the person who just moved to town asks their phone instead — and that is the job that never reaches you.
The five niches above are where the playbook is proven, not the limit of what works. If your work is visual, local and quoted per job, the same system usually transfers — and if it does not, you will be told.
Six Reasons the Work Is Great
but the Phone Is Quiet
None of these are marketing problems. They are plumbing problems — and every one of them is fixable in a week.
Forty-five percent of consumers now use AI to find local services, up from six percent a year earlier. SOCi studied 350,000 local businesses and found ChatGPT recommends one point two percent of them. Not the best one point two percent, the readable one point two percent. When someone two towns over asks their phone who to call, it says something. Is AI recommending you?
Your Google Business Profile carries thirty-two percent of local ranking weight. That's more than your website AND more than your reviews. Most trades set it up once, got busy, and never went back. It is the single highest-leverage thing on this list and it is almost always the most neglected.
Nobody has ever written a proper page about deck building in a town of four thousand people. Which means when someone asks AI about a trade in that town, there is nothing specific to cite... unless it is yours. A small market is not the handicap; it is the only kind of market a small operator can realistically own.
Seventy-eight percent of customers hire whoever responds first, and the average business takes forty-seven hours to reply to an enquiry. That gap is not a marketing problem, it is a plumbing problem, and it is why the form on our client sites is wired to put the lead on a phone in seconds rather than into an inbox nobody checks until Sunday.
Everything built on a social platform is rented. The algorithm changes, the reach halves, and the followers you spent three years earning stop seeing you — with no notice and no recourse. An email list is the only audience a small business actually owns, and almost no trade is building one.
A site can look expensive and still be invisible to the thing doing the recommending. No schema, no structured answers, no coordinates, no llms.txt — nothing a machine can quote with confidence. That is why the trade with the plainer-looking website is beating you: his is readable and yours is pretty.
The 90-Day Monopoly
Stop chasing customers on social media. Start being the answer when somebody nearby asks their phone who to call. Designed to have you recommended within 90 days.
Week one
Your Google Business Profile rebuilt properly. It is 32% of local ranking weight — more than your website, more than your reviews — and most trades filled it in once and never touched it again.
Week one
A real page for every town you serve. Not a list of place names in the footer — an actual page, with actual local specifics, that can rank and be cited on its own.
Week one
Schema markup, llms.txt, AI-readable FAQs, precise coordinates. This is the part nobody does, and it is the part that decides whether an AI can quote you at all.
Live on day seven
Enquiries hit your phone in seconds. 78% of customers hire whoever answers first, and the average business takes 47 hours.
Day seven onward
Every person who ever enquired goes on a list you own, growing every week. Instagram can change its algorithm tomorrow. Nobody can take your list.
See What the AI Says
About Your Town
Before you pay anything, you get shown exactly what ChatGPT, Google AI and Gemini say right now when someone asks for your trade in your town. Free, and honestly — you should know either way.
Prefer email? shawn@bigskycreative.org
$1,000 to Build It.
$197 a Month After That.
No long-term contract. Year one comes to $3,364, against a stack that would cost $41,900 bought piece by piece — about 12.5×.
Canadian agencies commonly charge fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred a month, and one of their own pricing guides describes what that buys as "basic on-page optimization, Google Business Profile management, monthly reporting, and limited content creation." That is this list, described by somebody charging ten times more.
Why Trades Choose
Bigsky Creative
Readable to machines, fast to respond, and something you can change yourself in ninety seconds.
Schema, llms.txt, structured answers and precise coordinates — the readable layer almost nobody ships, and the reason an AI can name you at all.
Not place names in the footer. A real page per community, with local specifics, that can rank on its own.
Enquiries hit your phone immediately, stored before anything else is attempted, so a delivery failure can never lose one.
Every enquiry becomes a name on your list. Platforms change their rules; your list does not.
Click the headline, the price or the photo and type. No dashboard, no plugin, no support ticket, no phone call.
Only one business per trade per town. Two clients cannot both be number one, so when a market is taken it is taken.
Audit First.
Built in Seven Days.
Before you pay anything, you get shown what ChatGPT, Google AI and Gemini actually say right now when someone asks for your trade in your town.
A real deliverable in a week — the site, the location pages, the schema layer and the lead capture, all wired up.
Your Google Business Profile rebuilt properly, then a post every week so it never goes stale again.
Every enquiry lands on your phone and on a list you own. You get a report each month showing what came in.
Questions Trades Ask
Bigsky Creative is a web design and local SEO studio based in Creston BC, working with visual local trades — pole barn and steel building companies, deck builders, fence builders, tree services and auto detailers — across the Kootenays and Canada-wide. The service area covers Cranbrook, Nelson, Castlegar, Kimberley, Trail and Fernie, and it is run by Shawn Bourque. Free growth audit before anything is quoted.
$1,000 to build it and $197 a month after that, with no long-term contract. Year one is $3,364. The monthly covers hosting and maintenance, one Google Business Profile post every week, a monthly emailed report, email list building, rebooking reminders and ongoing lead monitoring. Canadian agencies commonly charge $1,500 to $2,500 a month for roughly the same list of deliverables.
It is the framework Bigsky Creative builds on, and the name describes the timeline. The build itself takes seven days: CLAIM rebuilds your Google Business Profile, which carries 32% of local ranking weight; COVER builds a real page for every town you serve; CITE adds the schema, llms.txt and structured answers an AI needs in order to quote you; CAPTURE puts enquiries on your phone in seconds; CULTIVATE turns every enquiry into a name on a list you own. The whole build is designed to have you recommended within ninety days, because that is roughly how long it takes search engines and AI systems to crawl the new pages, trust the structured data and start drawing on it. That second half is the part nobody can rush, which is why the timeline is ninety days rather than seven.
Word of mouth is still the best lead there is and Bigsky Creative will not tell you otherwise. The problem is the customer who has nobody to ask — the person who just moved to town and asks their phone instead. Forty-five percent of consumers now use AI to find local services, up from six percent, and ChatGPT recommends only about 1.2% of local businesses. If you are not one of them you do not lose that job; you never find out it existed.
Possibly, and you will get an honest answer either way. The five niches Bigsky Creative names are where the playbook is proven rather than the limit of what it works for — if your work is visual, local and quoted per job, it usually transfers. Excavation, roofing, concrete, landscaping, window tint and pressure washing all fit that shape. Choose "Other" on the quote form, type in your trade, and you will be told plainly whether it is a fit.
Yes. Bigsky Creative is based in Creston and works with clients across Canada — the whole service is delivered remotely, so where you are matters far less than what you do. The Kootenay towns have their own pages because that is the home market and local knowledge genuinely helps, but nothing about the system requires being nearby.
You get a real deliverable in seven days. Bigsky Creative spent months automating the parts of this work that used to take an agency months, which is the reason it can be built in days and the reason it costs a fraction of what an agency charges. After launch, changes take about ninety seconds — you click the thing you want to change and you type, with no dashboard, no plugin and no support ticket.
You leave. There is no long-term contract, and the monthly is $197 rather than two thousand dollars, so if Bigsky Creative stops earning it you have lost the price of a tank of gas rather than a year of your marketing budget. That is deliberate — the Better Business Bureau takes over 13,000 complaints a year about SEO and web design, and the usual pattern is a long contract protecting an agency that stopped delivering.
Free growth audit, no commitment. the Kootenays and Canada-wide.
