HVAC SEO For Contractors : The Ultimate Guide

If you’re reading this page, you’re obviously interested in learning about tips or finding the best company that provides SEO for HVAC contractors. Whether you want HVAC SEO services or just want some of the most commonly used SEO strategies for HVAC companies, look no further. This article is going to dive into all aspects of how to get HVAC leads by improving the SEO of your website and other available channels.

After reading this to the end, you will have gained multiple ways to INSTANTLY improve your search visibility through SEO.

All roads to success start with an SEO audit and strategy session. It’s inevitable that you get this done. Why wait? Schedule your first hour-long free consultation to get insights into how to double the revenue of your HVAC business.

Feel free to skip ahead to any section of this page by clicking on the links below:

What is SEO for HVAC Contractors?

HVAC SEO is a digital marketing strategy to increase the search visibility of HVAC websites by improving the organic ranking for important keywords. If a potential client types “furnace repair” they will see your website appear at the top of the page in the organic search results. The result is an increase in traffic, leads, and revenue.

Google’s algorithm rewards websites that are optimized to appear for specific keyword topics. In today’s competitive climate, the term “optimized” doesn’t just mean how many keywords you have on your page. It refers to on-page optimization, the user experience, off-page optimization, quality of content, and how well a user is satisfied with the content they read when they land on your page.

SEO puts your website in front of potential clients who are looking for your services. It measures results and continually adjusts and optimizes the efforts to produce more leads and increase the revenue of your HVAC company.

Why is SEO for HVAC companies important?

The truth is SEO is playing a bigger role in our lives now more than ever before. This trend will only continue to grow as we grow more and more reliant on our smartphones for answers and information. Did you know that97% will discover a local company with an online search? That’s pretty much everyone looking to a search engine to find a local HVAC company in their area. Without SEO, you’re missing a massive opportunity to grow your business with new leads.

In a study performed by Backlinko and ClickFlow, it was found that a paltry 0.78% of users go to the second page of results. If you’re not on the first page of Google, you’re not being found! In addition, the #1 position gets 31.73% of clicks and this percentage diminishes steeply to the 10th position which receives 3.09% of the total clicks. With numbers like the chart above, it should be clear why SEO is so important for HVAC companies.

To get the most out of your business, you need to be at the top of Google’s search results. SEO increases your website traffic for important HVAC keywords.

More traffic equals more leads. More leads equal more revenue.

It’s that simple.

Are local SEO services for HVAC contractors the same as regular SEO?

To accurately answer this question, let’s make the distinction between the two types of SEO. Local SEO focuses on appearing for search traffic from a specific area, city, or region. Regular SEO is the process of improving the search visibility of a product or service on a national or global level.

Google’s algorithm works a little differently to display websites at the top of Google’s Local Finder. At Austin Byrant Consulting, both aspects of SEO are included in your online marketing strategy. To maximize the HVAC leads received from Google, your website should hold as many positions as possible on the first page of search results. Here’s what we did for one of our HVAC clients very recently.

In fact, when a keyword has proven to convert visitors into clients, we also recommend paid ads to boost revenue. Pay-Per-Click campaigns and local ads will add more ways for a potential client to click through to your website. Your SEO marketing plan should address the potential for earnings since in most cases, it’s a no-brainer.

Are local SEO services for HVAC contractors the same as regular SEO?

The nature of the heating and cooling industry is service area oriented. People search for local companies in their area. Most people will hop on their cell phone and search “ac repair near me” or “ac repair (their city)” and they will be looking at a screen similar to this:

Notice how Google is trying to dominate the search results themselves? The first screen a potential HVAC customer sees is the “Google Guaranteed” ads. Please note that these ads are different than regular Google Ads. They require a verification process to get the “Google Guarantee.” You can sign up and start the verification process here.

After seeing this, you might be wondering why to bother with SEO for HVAC contractors when Google Ads are dominating the top of the page on mobile. The truth is, paid ads DO make money but many people will skip over them to get to the next section of the page. On average, people are exposed to 5000 ads on a daily basis. It’s in our nature to avoid them unless, of course, they’re really good! The point being is that the next segment of the search results is the 3-pack or “snack pack” in Google’s Local Finder. Local businesses get a lot of leads from this area which is why many companies offer JUST local SEO for HVAC contractors. As a stand-alone service, it works to increase sales.

Effective elements of successful HVAC Internet marketing services

Whether you team up with us at Austin Bryant Consulting or not, the following elements are core services found in local SEO for HVAC contractors:

SEO Consulting & Strategy

We research your industry, and your competitors, and assess the status of your current website to develop an effective SEO strategy. The consulting doesn’t end once your strategy has been initiated. We monitor changes in traffic and trends that play significant roles in your business decisions. This includes scaling up or down product or service recommendations based on interest.

Keyword & Competition Analysis

Every month the performance of your ranking keywords is monitored and analyzed. We expand the number of keywords in the keyword topics that show positive performance. Your content strategy is constantly evolving by building on increasing the keywords your website is ranking for in the search engines. Every month we run the top competitors through a comparative analysis to monitor their performance and use the data to outperform their pages.

Content Creation & Strategy

This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. When a person types in a keyword they are expecting a specific result. We publish content to satisfy the searcher’s intent.

As your website develops more authority in any given niche, we continue to target the topics that drive the most interest in your product or service. Our on-site and off-site content strategy maximizes traffic and ranking ability.

On-Page Optimization

Once you are able to satisfy what people are looking for in your content, those pages need to satisfy what search engines are looking for to rank your page. On-page optimization is the process of editing pages to clearly communicate to search engines the main keywords that represent your page.

Highly optimized pages will naturally float to the top of the search results. Pages are also optimized to attract more clicks in the search result.

Link Building & Content Promotion

We share your website across the internet on high-authority websites to increase your online presence. When another website links to your site, it’s counted as a “vote of confidence” and improves your ability to outrank other websites. We also look for promotional opportunities from top news sites, top bloggers, and influencers for additional streams of traffic and brand awareness.

New resource content

To maintain steady growth a website needs to continually be publishing new and updated content. We define this strategy early on in your SEO campaign to include blog posts, a resource center, or additional location landing pages to expand your reach.

New or re-written core website pages

Every website should be structured to have core content. Whether it’s services pages or product pages these represent your main business. If they are sub-par or underperforming, we publish new pages or rewrite the existing ones to improve results.

Website behavior analysis

It’s not enough to simply know the volume of traffic and sales on your website. You need to know what people are doing once they’re there. This gives you the insight to scale up and scale back on specific keywords, pages, and content.

Improved and enhanced user experience

As Google continues to evolve, so must our websites. The experience that users have plays a big role in the perceived value of your website. Enhancing the user experience includes increasing page speed, adding images, breaking up large blocks of text, adding audio files, and virtually anything that improves the UX of the page.

Monthly Reporting

You can’t grow if you have no idea what you’re doing on paper! Every month we track the most important analytic statistics allowing you to monitor your website’s progress every step of the way. We also include ranking reports on all major keywords your website is appearing for as well as the improved visibility of your website’s total exposure on Google.

5 SEO strategies for your HVAC company that yield instant results

The following tips are easy to implement when you have a solid keyword strategy. You can skip down below and check out some of the top HVAC keyword performers to make these tips more powerful and see an instant improvement in ranking.

Note: Instant results can be different for everyone. Google is faster than it’s ever been at making changes but sometimes you won’t see those changes in the search results for a few days to a couple of weeks. The results will also be more impressive the worse off your optimization is!

1. Optimize your page titles and meta descriptions

The page title and meta description are the first things people see when they search Google and are presented with a list of options. The h1 title tag is one of the first areas to optimize for specific keyword searches because it tells search engines what your page is about. If you look at the image above, you can see that people who don’t know who City Energy is will not know exactly what they do. Believe it or not, some people don’t know that HVAC services include a long list of home repair and installation services. Your website should communicate to people at all levels of understanding.

Although the meta description is not a factor that affects how search engines rank your website, it can affect whether a user clicks on your page or not. An uninformative meta description will put a potential client to sleep and they’ll click somewhere else.

A meta description must detail exactly what the user is looking for using keyword-rich text. Using search terms within your text can entice more people to click on your page from the search results.

Here’s the current snippet of City Energy’s page title and meta description:

How to update your title and meta description

If you’re using WordPress, you should have an SEO plugin that makes things super easy to do like Yoast or All in One SEO. This way, at the bottom of every page you can directly update how your web pages look in the search results. They will give you the preview right there on the page.If you’re using website builders or platforms other than WordPress, the method will be different. Check out these links to popular platforms to help you find the area that allows you to update the metadata:

If you’re not what you’re using and you need help figuring it out, give us a call. You probably need help with your overall SEO anyway so why not book a free hour-long (if needed) strategy session and find out how you can make more money with your website?

2. Optimize your pages for local searches in a specific location/city

Location pages can completely change your business forever

Do you have clients that come from multiple cities nearby as well? Even if you have one location that doesn’t mean you can’t show up in searches in other cities! Location pages are basically landing pages that are optimized for your service in a specific city.

If you’re an HVAC contractor, chances are you operate in at least 3 or 4 cities that are all next to each other. Why show up in one city when you can get clients in all four cities!! Location pages are a way to spread your reach beyond your city and get your business in front of a larger audience.

Location pages are an SEO strategy for HVAC companies that facilitates the growth of your business through increased website traffic and more leads.

3. Claim and optimize your GMB profile

You might think this is a no-brainer (which it is) but there are so many businesses that DO NOT have a profile on Google My Business. This is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get traffic to your website. If you haven’t done so yet, here’s a link to walk you through the ropes on how to claim your GMB listing.

How to optimize your GMB profile listing

If you’ve already claimed your listing, optimize the crap out of it! It might sound complicated, but this is really straightforward. The best piece of advice is to go through every single text field in your profile and try to provide detailed information. The more information you offer up to the search engines, the more likely your website will get displayed in a search.

Take advantage of content opportunities

For example, your business description offers a place to write up to 750 words of content. Don’t let it go to waste! Write about every service you have and what your company does differently than others to make your profile stand out.

List all relevant categories to your service/product

Use all of the relevant categories you can to give your profile the greatest reach. The “category” section on GMB is changing all the time. Google is constantly adding new categories and taking out old ones. It’s important to type in all of the potential ways of describing your service so you don’t miss any juicy ones.

Keep your NAP details identical to anything else on the internet

NAP data refers to “Name, Address, and Phone number”. If there are any discrepancies in these details, the search engines are less likely to trust your website-especially if it’s relatively new. Make sure you’re meticulous with your NAP details on every website they could possibly be listed on.

4. Optimize your website’s content

Search engines have not only become very good at identifying the major keyword themes and topics of a page but can also assess the quality of content that’s provided. Apart from improving your website’s content to reflect the location and keywords, you must improve the level of communication it provides.

Fill in the missing gaps in content

Search Google for the keyword you would like to rank for in the search results. Click on the top 5 (or more) pages that rank for this keyword. You should be able to get the average length of the ranking pages (word count) to measure it up to yours.

Disclaimer: Higher word count does NOT mean better rankings. But if your page is 300 words and the average ranking page is 1000 words, that’s a red flag. To rank for your keyword, you need to see what content you’re missing on your page that Google is loving and ranking highly.

If a page has 1000 words published, then it should have a lot of subtitles and images to break up the text. These are all clues to how your page needs to measure up against the average.

Go through the most important pages on your website and make sure you update the content to reflect your location and keywords. In addition, add any details, content, or topics that your page is missing, and which are common to top-ranking pages.

5. List your website in local and popular directories

Build local links to your website by building citations. Citations are mentions of your NAP details (Name, Address, Phone Number) on third-party websites. There are two types of citations:

Structured citations

Websites that provide a specific place to put your company details. Examples include popular directories like Yellow Pages, Yelp, Manta, etc. You should also enter your details in niche directories like Homestars, Trusted Pros, Thumbtack, etc. The third type is local directories that are dedicated to hosting local information on companies in your city or region. Here’s a snippet of our entry into Yelp’s directory:

Unstructured citations

These are the holy grail of local link building for HVAC companies. Unstructured citations are mentions of your company and links to your website on websites like blogs, other businesses resource pages and basically anywhere that’s not a dedicated website to listing profiles and companies. These are much harder to get and therefore are valued much higher by search engines.

unstructured citation example
Not sure where to start? We offer a wide array of information on link building in our resource section. You can also get a list here of the topcitations for contractors and home services.

Top performing HVAC keywords

Are you having trouble figuring out the top-performing HVAC keywords? While every city is different, there are some commonalities between HVAC keywords. For example, HVAC companies in the North will get a lot more business on “furnace repair” whereas down south “AC repair” will be a bigger money maker.

If you want to know what some of the best keyword opportunities are for your business, schedule a strategy session with one of our SEO consultants. We’ll be happy to go over your current ranking positions and point out your best traffic opportunities and keyword targets.

In the meantime, click on the link below for a list of the top keywords one of the top HVAC companies in Plano, TX sorted by highest cost per click:

HVAC SEO keywords N.TX cities

Want to learn how to get HVAC leads through your website?

It’s simple. Call us. Schedule a consultation with one of our SEO specialists and listen to what we have to say. If you’re not excited about what we tell you, then maybe we’re not a good fit. The bottom line is we’ll tell you EXACTLY how to get HVAC leads from your website.

What are we so confident about our work?

Because we’ve done it hundreds of times over!

We work with HVAC companies who invest in their business and are excited about a healthy ROI within 6-9 months in the medium competition cities and within 12 months for the biggest cities with the toughest competition.