If you own an HVAC company, you may have periods – like during heat waves or cold snaps – that you can’t keep up with demand. But during other times, you may be struggling for leads.
Those slow periods are when you can focus on your website, which should be structured with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.
Not sure what that means or where to begin? That’s what this SEO guide is for.
SEO is the behind-the-scenes formula marketing experts like us at SEO Design Chicago used to get a website to rank high in search engine results pages (SERP) after a person searches for a certain word or phrase.
For HVAC businesses, those words can include “HVAC repair near me” or “cheap HVAC repair” or just “HVAC.”
If you master SEO, you can get your name or company website to appear high on page one of SERP. Getting a page ranked high in SERP increases your brand’s awareness – at the very least – and could lead to a sales or transaction – at the very best.
But getting to the top of SERP isn’t easy. We couldn’t install a new HVAC system without your expert help, and you may need our expert help to get to the top of SERP. Google has over 200 factors that their algorithm considers when deciding where to rank a webpage. Yes, figuring out 200 little parts – and remembering them every time you put together a webpage – can feel overwhelming. But with a little education – whether you get it through articles like this or a course or a book – you’ll start to get the hang of it.
And if SEO gives you a migraine, you can have us handle some or all of your website content creation, redesign or design your website and more. We have been in the SEO business for over 10 years. You can read about the experiences of our satisfied clients here.
In order to succeed in SEO and mastering the art of organic traffic, you need to have a SEO strategy campaign for your HVAC website. Whether through this person, a one-on-one consultation or ongoing meetings, we can give you all the tips you need to implement some search engine optimization strategies on your site to give you an immediate boost in the search results.
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What is SEO For an HVAC Company?
Search engine optimization is the step-by-step process you have for getting people to click on your website, and explore it, for free through search engine results. For HVAC companies, you want to make sure you use a lot of words on your website, especially in page titles, page text and meta description (The words that appear under a company’s name in search results) related to HVAC, such as:
- Heating
- Air conditioning
- HVAC repair
- HVAC installation
- New heater
- New air conditioner
- Heating and cooling near me
- Duct cleaning
There are some other SEO rules for HVAC companies too. We’ve listed them here.
SEO Basics
There are a few key SEO principles to keep in mind if you want to handle SEO on your own, without guidance from industry experts like us at SEO Design Chicago. If it’s too much to remember or deal with, we can handle it for you. Here they are:
Analyze Your Competitors
You must understand, through research, who your competition is online. That may not be the same competition you have in the real world. For example, you may hear that customers are also getting quotes from an HVAC specialist who is a friend of a friend and lives where most of your customers do. But if that person doesn’t have a website or reviews online, then that person is your competition in real life, but not in the digital space.
Your competition online may be HVAC companies that simply spend more on pay-per-click Google ads or have big websites. Don’t worry. You can compete with both the person who doesn’t have a website and big HVAC companies that do. But you can’t really compete with them until you’ve analyzed their digital presence, and looked closely at their websites. What tools do they offer HVAC customers on their websites? For example, do they have a chatbot that can take leads 24/7? Buttons people can click to schedule appointments? Online payment services? This is what you want to know before doing anything.
Keep a list of what you like about your competition’s websites, and anything you think you can do better.
Once you have the names of companies and their websites, you can use tools to see where they are ranking in SERP. Some tools that will tell you where you rank in relation to your HVAC competition include AHrefs. Then, you can start to figure out your SEO strategy to outrank them. It’s like any game. Learn what your opponent is doing, and how your opponent thinks, before you try to beat your opponent.
Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is a huge part of any SEO strategy. You need to perform keyword research, through Google Keyword Planner or other tools, in order to choose the correct keywords to target. Keywords are the words and phrases people enter into Google or Bing’s search engines when looking for something. We gave you some examples of HVAC keywords above.
The Google Keyword Planner is free. Other tools, like AHrefs have more data, but you need to pay for them (Or keep signing up for free 2 week trials). Keyword research tells you what keywords are for your industry, and how many people use those words.
For example, we entered “HVAC” into Google Keyword Planner and found this:
HVAC gets 100k to 1 million searches per month. Google’s tool is actually used for ad campaigns on Google. So the other information on the results shows you that competition for appearing at the top of SERP in ads is “medium.” People bid between $5.97 and $33.58 to appear in Google Ads. The high range likely occurs during periods of extreme weather, when HVAC systems fail.
You don’t need to worry about bids until you want to buy Google PPC ads. But you still want to use this tool because it tells you how many people search for a term, and also gives you suggestions for other terms. For example, the tool suggests AC repair near me, hvac near me, and ac repair as other words to incorporate into your content.
You want to use those words and phrases a lot on the pages of your HVAC site, but not too much. You also want to make sure you’re placing those keywords in the right places on your site – like page titles (the words that appear in the tabs of windows), headlines or titles (the biggest words on a page), subheads (the second largest words on the page), in the regular section of a page (like the paragraphs you’re reading now) and alt tags of images (the words that appear when your cursor hovers over an image). Knowing these places and balancing the use of keywords is what many HVAC companies, who don’t know a lot about SEO, find tricky, and why they turn to third party digital marketing experts like us for training, or ongoing content creation.
Craft Content Around the Problems You Can Solve for Customers
The primary goal of any website should be providing important content and information to its visitors. While there are many tips and tricks we can teach you about SEO, the best chance you have of succeeding is by creating excellent content keeping real people, with real problems, in mind first and foremost. Keyword research naturally weaves into this. After all, your clients have HVAC problems, so it’s not surprising that AC repair is a common keyword (and remember, keywords can be phrases too).
In order to make great content, you need to know who your users are. Often, business owners think of their customers in terms of demographics, like age, income level, gender, etc. Don’t assume too much in these areas. Studies have shown that women usually make large monetary decisions, like how much to pay for a new air conditioning system. Beyond that, you also want to know what people’s hvac problems are. Often it’s about repair over total replacement. During some seasons, it’s about tune-up. And then there are extreme situations, when people need a whole new system. And remember the keywords related to big expenses – affordable, inexpensive, and quite frankly – cheap. So use words that relate to money at some points in your site. And if you give free estimates, make sure that you use the word “free” a lot. People like “free.”
Redesign Your Website
SEO isn’t all about words. It’s about design too. Your website’s loading time (how fast it can bring up all of the images, text and videos) is a ranking factor when Google figures out where to place sites in search results. You can enter the URL of your site into a site loading time calculator like this one. If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, Google will rank your site lower in SERP. Google also makes sure a website is mobile friendly. That means your site should look good on a variety of phone types. If it’s not, they ding the website a few points. If redesigning a website is way out of your skill set, call us.
Make Sure Your Website is Organized
Just like web design, how the pages on your website link to one another is important for SEO purposes. Your pages also need to be linked together in some fashion. Your website users – and search engine crawlers – need to be able to move about your site fast. That means you should always include at least one link on each page to another page on your own site. You also need a user friendly, easy to understand navigation menu. Use simple words like “Repair” and “Estimates” and “Contact Us.” Look at our website navigation menu. We have a lot of items but we think they’re organized clearly. And on this page, you’ll see links to other pages on our site. Having excellent content on your site is pointless if your site visitors, not to mention search engines, can’t find it.
Still Need Help with HVAC SEO?
If you still need help with the SEO strategy for your HVAC company, SEO Design Chicago can assist you. Contact us today for a free SEO audit of a webpage and then we can talk about next steps.
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