HVAC SEO: Your Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business With Search Engine Optimization 

Is your HVAC business struggling to keep your customer schedule full? Chances are, your website isn’t very visible in search engines. 

Right now, perform a Google search for “HVAC near me,” “furnace repair near me,” and other terms you would want to link potential customers to your company. Is your business in the top three search results — or even on the first page at all? 

Your placement in search engine rankings isn’t luck. It hinges on your adherence to a complex algorithm that Google is constantly modifying and updating. 

But with the right HVAC SEO strategies in place, you can increase your visibility on search engines like Google, show your website to the right people, and bring more customers to your door. 

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to leverage HVAC SEO and soar to the top of search results. 

Let’s dive in. 

Key Takeaways

• HVAC SEO is crucial for increasing visibility and attracting more customers to HVAC businesses.
  • Utilizing SEO strategies can improve search engine rankings and ensure that potential customers find your business online.
• SEO involves various tactics such as keyword optimization, technical website improvements, and mobile-friendliness.
• Reputation management, business citations, and social media marketing are vital for enhancing online presence.
• Building backlinks and utilizing schema markup can further boost SEO efforts.
• Avoid common SEO mistakes like duplicate or low-quality content, keyword stuffing, and buying backlinks to maintain a positive online reputation and ranking.
• Avoid link schemes, excessive link exchanges, and hidden text or links, as these violate Google’s policies and can lead to penalties.
• SEO is an ongoing process that requires continuous improvement and adjustment to keep up with changing algorithms and competition.
• Consider hiring a professional marketing team like Relentless Digital to handle complex SEO tactics if you find them overwhelming or lack the time to manage them yourself.

What Is HVAC SEO? 

HVAC SEO is the specialized process of increasing search engine visibility and rankings for HVAC companies. Before we explain exactly what search engine optimization is, let’s review a few statistics:

• 87% of consumers use Google to evaluate local businesses. 
• At least 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. 
• SEO drives at least 1,000% more traffic than organic social media strategies. 
• 60% of people contact businesses directly from local search results 

In this digital age, people aren’t using the Yellow Pages to find your HVAC business. Instead, they use Google, Safari, and other search engines. And most won’t scroll past the first page, let alone the first few results, to find an HVAC business for their repair service. 

The HVAC companies that outrank your business in search results use search engine optimization (SEO) to show Google that their websites meet users’ search queries. To stay competitive, your business needs to leverage this strategy as well.

HVAC SEO is all about catering your website and online presence to search engine algorithms. Including the right keywords, content, and back-end elements can show Google that your website is what users are looking for when they search “HVAC near me” and related terms. 

Good SEO involves curating virtually every element of your website and digital presence to this algorithm. It’s a slow-moving process, but it can produce incredible results for your lead-generation strategy when done well. 

Why Put Time Into SEO as an HVAC Company? 

SEO is one of many digital marketing strategies your HVAC business can use to reach more customers. But this strategy poses many benefits that make it an essential component of any effective marketing campaign. 

SEO Markets Your Business for You 

SEO takes time and effort to perfect. But once you have a solid SEO strategy in place, it will continue working for you in the background — for free. 

When your website and Google Maps listings appear near the top of search results, they will naturally reach more potential customers. Those users will see that your business is a reliable choice for their HVAC needs, and they’ll follow the steps you have laid out for them to contact your business and book an appointment. Essentially, your customers guide themselves through the lead generation funnel. 

Because SEO harnesses the power of organic traffic, it is completely free to implement. You don’t need to pay any maintenance fees to keep your search engine rankings high. You just need to keep up with the strategies that put you there in the first place. 

SEO Keeps You Competitive

SEO isn’t really optional if you want to stay competitive in your local HVAC space. Your competitors are already using HVAC SEO strategies to make sure that they appear at the top of search results. If your business simply does nothing, you’ll continue being outranked by these other businesses, slowly moving further and further down the search results. 

But with the right SEO strategies in place, you can keep your business competitive.  

SEO is Highly Measurable

Having access to measurable results is key to a successful marketing campaign, but not all strategies offer that luxury. With search engine optimization, however, your performance is highly measurable.

You can always perform a Google search and see where your business appears in the results. But you can also use SEO tools to analyze finer data points, such as:

• Organic traffic
• Total clicks
• Bounce rate
• Exit rate
• Pages per session
• Average session duration

You can also evaluate how your website ranks for each keyword you target and how your rankings change over time. These metrics let you make targeted changes to improve your SEO strategy.  

SEO Produces an Excellent ROI 

The average return on investment (ROI) from an effective SEO strategy is as much as 21x. This rate is much higher than virtually any other marketing strategy.

When done well, your SEO strategy will be highly profitable. You don’t need to pay to maintain your SEO strategies, so the only real costs come in when you hire marketing professionals to help you implement the SEO tactics below. You can leverage SEO for free if you want to, but it will take a lot of your time, which is a cost in itself. 

9 Expert Tips To Leverage SEO for Your HVAC Company

Boosting your search engine rankings won’t happen overnight. Instead, think of HVAC SEO as a strategy that you are constantly tweaking and updating to better suit search engine requirements. 

These tips can get you started as you build a comprehensive SEO campaign for your HVAC company. 

1. Use the Right Keywords in Your Content 

Your website’s keyword usage plays a huge role in your search engine rankings. Keywords are terms that users search for in their queries. Your website needs to contain the same keywords that potential customers are using in their queries; this way, Google will know to show your website as a top result for those queries. 

But simply including keywords on your website isn’t enough to boost your rankings. You need to use keywords in the right positions and frequencies. You also need to use different types of keywords to outrank the other websites that are currently showing up at the top of the results. 

Your first step is to perform HVAC keyword research. Dozens of tools can show you what keywords you should be using; Google Keyword Planner is a popular choice, but a different tool could suit your workflow better. 

Conducting keyword research helps you plan which keywords your website should try to rank for. With Google Keyword Planner and other tools, you’ll find information like:

• Which keywords are most popular for HVAC businesses
• How difficult a keyword is to rank for
• The associated secondary and semantic keywords that you should also include with a term
• The traffic potential for specific keywords

After finding keywords, you need to strategically incorporate them into written content on your website. A good rule of thumb for main keywords, or the primary terms you want to rank for, is to use them:

• In the Heading 1 for the page
• In the first 100 words of the page
• Once every 500 words thereafter
• In the last 100 words of the page

Then, you must include all of the secondary and semantic keywords at least once on the page while incorporating secondary keywords into headings where possible. This dispersion avoids keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is a spammy SEO tactic that involves using keywords too many times in your text in a way that sounds forced and unnatural. Google sees keyword stuffing as a sign that the content is low-quality, which may lead the algorithm to rank your site lower or even block it from results. 

2. Improve the Technical Aspects of Your Website 

Google doesn’t only look at the content on your website to determine your rankings. It looks at your HVAC website as a whole, including the technical, back-end elements. 

Technical SEO is a crucial HVAC SEO strategy that involves optimizing many elements, including: 

• Page speed
• Website architecture
• XML sitemap
• URL structure

All of these factors impact your website’s crawlability, or the ease with which a search engine crawler can analyze your site and determine whether it fits a user’s search query. They also impact your site’s security and usability, which Google sees as important factors within a high-quality website. 

If you aren’t a web developer, you may not have the expertise to optimize these back-end elements. But one thing you can do is determine whether they are currently helping or hurting your search engine rankings. 

Start by using an online website speed test to analyze your page load time. Ideally, your loading speed should sit around 2 seconds or less. If your website loads any slower than this, talk to your developer about how to speed it up. 

Also, evaluate your website’s usability. Ask yourself questions like:

• Is information easy to find? 
• Can users navigate between pages seamlessly? 
• Does the layout look clean? 
• Do photos and videos load quickly? 
• Can you access any page on the website from the home page? 

If you answered “No,” to any of these questions, reevaluate how you can improve your site for technical SEO purposes. 

3. Improve the Mobile-Friendliness of Your Website 

Your website needs to be user-friendly and easy-to-navigate on both desktop and mobile devices. More than 50% of all web traffic is from a mobile device. When potential customers in your area complete a quick Google search for “HVAC near me,” you can expect they are doing so through their smartphone or tablet. 

Google also prioritizes websites that are mobile-friendly. The search engine knows whether users are searching from desktop or mobile devices. If a user searches for “HVAC near me” from a mobile device and your site isn’t mobile-friendly, Google probably won’t want to display it. 

Websites that look good on a desktop don’t automatically look good on mobile browsers. Your website must have a responsive web design that automatically adjusts to the size of the screen and the type of device for each user. 

A mobile-optimized website: 

• Has large buttons that are easy to tap on a touch screen
• Uses easy-to-read fonts
• Minimizes design elements to avoid clutter 
• Does not require Flash to load
• Avoids large chunks of text

Right now, pull up your website on your smartphone. Can you easily scroll through the homepage without accidentally clicking on links or buttons? Are buttons easy to press when you want to? Can you navigate to the contact page and specific service pages quickly? If not, talk to your developer about enhancing these qualities. 

4. Cater Content to E-E-A-T Guidelines

Google wants to be sure that your website is high-quality and adequately answers users’ questions. To evaluate the quality of your website, the Google search algorithm considers the following factors:

• Experience: Content showing that you actually have first-hand experience with the topics you’re discussing and aren’t just summarizing other sources
• Expertise: Content that showcases your expertise in the HVAC industry (high-level information, certifications, licenses, etc.)
• Authoritativeness: Content that illustrates your reputation in the HVAC industry
• Trustworthiness: Content that is factual and accurate

These factors are not part of Google’s algorithm; rather, they are criteria used within Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Google Quality Raters are real people who help Google measure the relevancy of search results. As a result, search engine optimization isn’t just about appealing to the algorithm; you also need to ensure that your website is high-quality. 

Partnering with professional content writers can help you stock your website full of written content that displays your E-E-A-T compatibility.

5. Focus on Reputation Management

Now we’re getting into some of the more complex and high-level HVAC SEO tactics. Mastering these strategies can take your website from the bottom of the first page to the first three search results. 

The first is reputation management, or monitoring what people are saying about you online — namely, in your online reviews. As many as 92% of users read online reviews to evaluate a local business before making a buying decision. That means that the vast majority of your potential HVAC customers are reading your reviews to determine whether to choose you or another business in your area. 

Your reviews also impact your online visibility. For example, the number and quality of your Google reviews influence whether Google Maps displays your HVAC business in its list of top three businesses, or the “Map Pack.” A good reputation management strategy involves:

• Actively requesting feedback from customers
• Responding to all reviews of your business, both positive and negative ones
• Providing clarification for negative reviews to lessen their impact on your reputation
• Securing new reviews frequently

But you don’t only need reviews on your Google Business Profile. People find information about HVAC businesses everywhere: Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and numerous other platforms. We recommend using a tool like Zapier to repurpose great reviews across all platforms. 

When you notice a positive, thoughtful review on Google or Facebook, take the time to publish it on all of your other platforms as well, including your website. Doing so can help you drive new customers who are ready to buy and will influence your reputation as a whole, indirectly affecting your SEO. 

To take reputation management a step further, consider filming video testimonials from some of your most satisfied customers. These videos can go a long way in proving to potential customers that your business is trustworthy and reputable. 

6. Create Business Citations With NAP Data 

Business citations are mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP data) across the web. They are important elements of local SEO, which is the process of increasing your online visibility for users in your local area. 

While business citations always include NAP data, they can also include other information about your HVAC business, such as:

• Your website URL
• Your social media handles
• Your hours of business
• Information about your services
• Your business email address

Users should have no trouble finding your business’s contact information online. And the information they find should be consistent and accurate; you shouldn’t have multiple spellings of your business name or several different addresses out there (unless you have multiple locations, of course). 

The more business citations you have across the internet, the easier it will be for potential customers to find your business. At a minimum, you should have citations on all of the following platforms:

• Facebook
• Google
• Yelp
• Apple Maps
• Foursquare
• Bing Maps

For example, you can create a Google Business Profile that appears as a widget when users search for your business name in Google. Similarly, you can set up your profile on Apple Business Connect so that your business appears in Apple Maps, Apple Wallet, Siri, and related features. 

Business citation platforms are constantly changing, and you want to stay up to date with the newest features to ensure that your business is visible in every relevant outlet. Taking the time to optimize your listings on major platforms like Google Maps and Apple Maps will make it easier for potential customers to find you with these tools. 

For instance, you can optimize your Apple Business Connect through steps like:

• Adding a cover image and logo
• Creating a compelling description of your business
• Adding photos of your team
• Keeping all business information up-to-date and accurate 
• Sharing discounts and special offers 
• Promoting business events

Business citations are a full-fledged marketing strategy in themselves, but taking the time to start optimizing a few of your listings can increase your HVAC company’s visibility. 

7. Use Social Media as a Marketing Tool

Social media is often an intimidating concept for HVAC businesses. You may have avoided this strategy up until this point for fear of doing something wrong. 

But if you want to grow your business and stay competitive in your local area, you need social media — it’s as simple as that. Today, having a presence across all the major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter — is almost a bare minimum requirement for staying relevant in this digital age. 

You must learn the types of content that perform best on each platform, then create a content strategy to post at least a few times a week on each platform. You can often reuse or repurpose content from one platform to another, but not all platforms support all the same types of posts. 

For example, you can post virtually any marketing materials on Facebook: text posts, photos, or videos. But TikTok only supports short-form videos. 

TikTok reached 1.92 billion users in 2023, and thousands of businesses use this platform to share their products and services. To leverage this platform, you should:

• Stay in the know about TikTok trends and lean into them
• Create short, engaging videos
• Incorporate trending sounds into your videos
• Encourage viewers to leave comments and ask questions
• Respond to questions with other videos
• Share why viewers need HVAC services and create a sense of urgency 

TikTok gives your business a platform to share casual, authentic content that builds trust and gets your name out there. Meanwhile, Instagram warrants slightly more curated content that paints your business’s professionalism and authority, and Twitter requires short, catchy statements about your services. 

Your first step is to create accounts on each of these platforms. Then, slowly begin building up content that markets your business. You don’t have to be an expert photographer or videographer to create compelling content, but if you feel stuck, you can always ask a marketing professional for help. 

8. Build Backlinks to Your Website 

Link building is another strategy you may have heard of within HVAC SEO. It’s the process of acquiring backlinks from other websites that link to your site.

Google’s algorithm sees backlinks as a good sign of your website’s authority and trustworthiness, as it must be high-quality if other websites want to link to it as a source. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher your search engine rankings. 

You can build backlinks through three main strategies:

1. Contact websites and ask them to link to yours. 
2. Manually add links to social media profiles, business directories, etc. 
3. Earn links by creating high-quality content that people want to link to. 

For the first strategy, you can reach out to the owners of blog posts, eBooks, case studies, and infographics that have to do with HVAC and ask them to link to a relevant page on your website. Of course, you’ll need professional, relevant content on your website that is worth linking to. 

You can use tools like Semrush’s Link Building Tool to find relevant websites to reach out to. It doesn’t hurt to reach out to as many websites as possible; only a fraction of them will actually become backlinks. 

Manually adding links to business directories and other pages is the easiest way to build backlinks, but these links are pretty low-quality, and Google may not always view them as credits toward your trustworthiness. So your best bet is asking for and earning back links, both of which require you to have expert content on your website. 

We often recommend building up your content strategy first, then working on backlinks. 

9. Learn Schema Markup and Use It Wisely

Schema markup is an advanced HVAC SEO strategy. It doesn’t necessarily impact your search engine rankings, but it does help your website stand out in search results, leading more users to choose your site. It’s also a lesser-known SEO tactic, which means your competitors may not be using it yet. 

Schema markup is a form of structured data or code that you add to your website pages to help search engines understand your content. It tells Google exactly what data is on each page, such as:

• Images
• Contact information
• Customer ratings
• Prices
• Page authors

After you mark up this data, Google can quickly display relevant information right in the search results. So when users search for “HVAC near me,” Google can display your website along with your contact information, average customer rating, and other relevant details. 

Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool makes this process quick and easy. Just insert the link to a page on your website, choose “Local Businesses” as the page type, and follow the prompts to identify specific elements on the page. Once you’re finished, Google will give you a block of code that you can copy and paste into your website HTML. 

Take the time to mark up each page on your website to see the best results for HVAC SEO. 

HVAC SEO Mistakes To Avoid As You Ramp Up Your Strategy 

Good HVAC SEO involves using the right strategies while avoiding the wrong ones. Google may penalize you for approaching SEO the wrong way, harming your rankings. As you build your SEO strategy, avoid these common mistakes and bad practices that could cancel out your efforts. 

Duplicate & Low-Quality Content

If we haven’t stressed it enough, having high-quality content is integral to your HVAC SEO strategy. Think quality over quantity. 

In an effort to build their content strategies, many HVAC businesses start cranking out quick content to fill service pages and block posts. Alternatively, they focus more on keywords than on producing professional content that sounds good. 

But if your content does not meet the E-E-A-T ranking factors, Google won’t rank your website highly in search results. Low-quality content:

• Is riddled with grammatical errors
• Contains outdated information
• Only addresses topics at the surface level
• Plagiarizes from other websites

Recently, many HVAC businesses have begun using AI to generate content for their websites. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with AI-written content, you must do your due diligence to make sure the content is accurate, makes sense, and sounds professional. For the time being, you’re better off using AI content sparingly while turning to professional content writers for the bulk of your website.  

As a side note, you also need to avoid duplicate content on your website. Remove pages that are word-for-word copies of other pages or that contain portions of other pages. If you’re creating location pages, you can’t just copy and paste the text from page to page and change the location; you need to write fresh copy for each. 

Keyword Stuffing & Cannibalization 

As you build your keyword strategy, you must use the right keywords in the right frequencies. Keyword stuffing and cannibalization are two common mistakes that can harm your search engine rankings. 

We’ve already touched on keyword stuffing, which is overusing keywords so much that they no longer sound natural. Google can tell when you are stuffing keywords into a page just for SEO purposes. Using a keyword too many times won’t help your rankings, and it can even tell Google that your page is spam and the algorithm shouldn’t display it. 

Meanwhile, keyword cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages on your website that target the same keyword. These pages must compete with each other, hurting both of their rankings. Keyword cannibalization can also happen when you have duplicate content, which is another reason to delete duplicate pages. 

If you already have multiple pages that target the same keyword, research variations of that keyword that you can use instead. 

Image Issues

Including images throughout your website helps improve engagement and break up big blocks of text. You can also include real images of your technicians and HVAC projects to improve your credibility. But you must avoid image problems that could hurt your rankings. 

Periodically look for broken images, which are photos the site cannot display because they no longer exist or the URL is incorrect. Replace these images with higher-quality options. 

Also, avoid oversized images that slow down your page speed. Your images should be no larger than 70 kB, but aim for closer to 40 kB if possible. 

Finally, ensure that all of your images include alt text, which is a phrase or sentence that describes the image. Include as much detail about the image as you can. If you can naturally work in a keyword, do so, but avoid stuffing it in. 

Buying Backlinks 

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines include specific spam policies that, if you violate them, could lead Google to blacklist your website. One is buying backlinks. 

Google expressly prohibits buying backlinks. You can’t pay someone to include a link to your site on their site. You also can’t offer to exchange goods or services for links. Google considers all of these practices to be “link schemes,” which violate its policies and lead to penalties. 

Google also prohibits “excessive link exchanges,” or offering to link to someone else’s site in exchange for a backlink to your site. The algorithm will quickly notice if all of your backlinks come from sites that you also link to on your website. 

Instead, stick to the three strategies we outlined above to build backlinks. 

Hidden Text or Links 

Another practice that goes against Google’s Terms of Service is including hidden text or links for SEO purposes. You can’t include white text on a white background or hide text behind an image just to get the right keywords on a page. You also cannot hide links by inserting them in a single character, such as a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph. 

Even if these practices were allowed, they wouldn’t do much to help your rankings. Google looks for content that naturally includes keywords. It also looks for pages with links and keywords that are relevant to the topic of the page.  

Failing To Keep Up With SEO

Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, and new websites are built every three seconds. Just because your website page ranks in the first slot now doesn’t mean it will stay there. 

You should think of SEO as an ongoing strategy that you continuously improve and adjust. Once you lay the groundwork of your strategy by following the tips above, you won’t need to spend too much time on updates each month. Targeting a few new keywords, evaluating your KPIs, checking your technical SEO, and keeping up with your social media pages can all help you stay at the top of your SEO game. 

Skyrocket Your Search Engine Rankings With Relentless Digital 

HVAC SEO has the potential to seriously improve your website traffic and bring more customers to your door. With the right strategies in place, you’ll consistently see a full customer schedule and have an ever-flowing influx of HVAC customers ready to book services. You’ll also build a reputation as a trustworthy, honest, reliable company that customers can feel confident choosing for HVAC services in your area. 

But HVAC SEO is also a time-consuming process that requires a lot of learning and trial and error. Some HVAC company owners enjoy the process of tinkering with SEO and watching their rankings rise. But if the idea of implementing the tips above sounds overwhelming, or you simply don’t have time to spend on these complex SEO tactics, consider hiring a marketing team to handle it for you. 

At Relentless Digital, we’re a full-scale digital marketing agency that exclusively partners with HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. We have over 15 years of HVAC business experience and know the powerful strategies you need to reach more customers. 

We’d be happy to take over the full responsibility of HVAC SEO for your company along with other digital marketing tactics that can grow your business. Book your free custom marketing strategy call today to get started.