HVAC Companies: what the work produced

This page covers one engagement with an HVAC company. We have not named the client. The figures come from call tracking and the company’s own job records, and where we do not have a figure, the page says so instead of estimating one.

The situation

HVAC search is driven by urgency. A homeowner whose air conditioning stops on a hot afternoon does not compare six websites. They search, look at the map results and the top listings, and call the first company that looks close and answers. A company that is not in that short list does not lose a close sale. It loses the call before it knows it was made.

That made this a different problem from a business people research for weeks. The question was not how to be found by someone browsing. It was how to be the company that appears, and picks up, at the moment the system fails, and how to tell the difference between a repair call and a replacement call, because one is worth far more than the other.

What we found

Before we change anything on an HVAC account, we check four things. Each one fails in a different way.

Service and area pages

A company with one page called Services cannot rank for repair, installation, duct work and maintenance plans at once, and it cannot show up for each city it serves. A search engine matches a query to a page, and one page answers one question well.

The local listing

A company that drives to the customer is a service-area business. Its Google Business Profile needs the right categories, the service areas set, and the same name and phone number that appear on the website. When those disagree, Google is less certain which version to show.

Call handling

Calls that go to voicemail in the evening or on a weekend are usually calls to the next company on the list. Call tracking shows how many calls came in outside staffed hours and how many were never answered. Most owners have never seen that number.

Ad spend

In a Google Ads account, the search terms report shows what people typed before they clicked. Money spent on job seekers, training courses, do-it-yourself repairs and parts shows up there, and none of it can become a customer.

What we did

Work of this kind on an HVAC account usually has three parts. The mechanism behind each is below, so you can judge whether it applies to your company.

Pages built around services and places. We build one page for each service, and one for each service in each city you serve. A page about air conditioner repair for one city is a different page from the same service for the next city, because the person searching in each place wants a company that works there. Each page names the problem, the equipment you work on, how a visit runs and how to book.
Campaigns split by job type. Emergency repair, replacement and maintenance plans are different purchases with different urgency and different job values. We put them in separate campaigns so the budget can follow the work you want more of, and so the ad matches what was typed. Ad scheduling follows the hours calls are actually answered, so spend does not buy calls that go to voicemail.
Tracking that follows the job. Each traffic source gets its own tracking number, and calls are tagged by job type: repair, replacement, maintenance or other. Attribution is multi-touchpoint. That matters because a homeowner often clicks an ad about a repair, finds that the unit is too old to fix, and searches again for a replacement quote days later. Last-click reporting credits only the final search. Multi-touchpoint reporting shows the path.

Recent Work

Dental professionals of coral springs

What happened

How the numbers were counted matters more than the numbers. A call is counted as a lead only when it has been logged as a real job inquiry, and calls that were spam, wrong numbers, vendors or existing customers are left out. Booked jobs are counted from the company’s own dispatch or job records, not from our dashboard. If an agency cannot tell you how it counts a call, its call numbers cannot be compared with anyone else’s.

Service-area businesses have one more detail to check. Google explains how to set service areas on a business profile without publishing a street address, and it is worth reading before you judge any agency’s local results.

These results belong to one company, in one market, over one period. Competition, season, the company’s starting condition and how many jobs its crews can take on all change what is possible. This page describes what happened here. It does not predict what will happen for you.

Is your situation similar

This case study fits best if you run service crews, you have capacity to take on more jobs, and at least one of the following is true.

Your website has one page for all services, or one page for all the cities you serve.
Your calls are not tracked by source or by job type, so you cannot say which marketing produced a replacement and which produced a tune-up.
Your ads run at hours when nobody answers the phone.
You run Google Ads and nobody has read the search terms report in the last quarter.

If that describes you, send us your current call records and, if you run ads, your search terms report. We will tell you what we see, including when the answer is that your current setup is sound. Call us today.