4 SEO Tips for HVAC Companies

Wondering how to get more customers for your HVAC business? We have great news for you. It all boils down to two principles. Yes, just two:

1. Get found.
   
2. Be good.

In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy that increases the chance (optimizes) that Google (search engine) will display your website among a potential customer’s search results.

In other words, if you have good SEO, when someone types “air conditioner repair” into Google, your website will jump up and down, wave its arms in the air, and holler, “Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! ” And, Google will do exactly that.

As you might expect, that whole jumping-waving-hollering bit is pretty complex. As an HVAC shop, it’s not necessary for you to understand all the intricacies of SEO ( that’s our job). But here are four tips to get you started.

First, a definition: Keywords are those words or phrases people type into Google when they’re looking for something.

If someone’s air conditioning won’t kick on, they’ll likely type in “broken air conditioner.” Homeowners who consider themselves handy might type it in a bit differently: “How to fix a broken air conditioner.” People who don’t have time to deal with any of it might type in, “HVAC company” and the name of your town. Those are all keywords, and you want them all over your website… in meaningful ways (see below).

How do you know what keywords are important to include? Here are some ideas:

• Think like a customer. Look through the last year of service call records. What sorts of problems did your customers have? What do you suppose they might type into Google to find help for those problems?
  
• Use Google’s Keyword Tool. Buried inside Google AdWords, which is a pay-to-play service, you’ll find the free Keyword Tool. Even if you’re not paying to advertise with Google, you can use this tool. Brainstorm some keywords, enter those into the tool, and Google will give you an idea of their effectiveness. It’ll also suggest options. Ideally, you’ll want to use keywords that are frequently searched (high volume) but that aren’t being used on a lot of other websites (low competition).
  
• Search Google yourself. Start typing a search query into Google and see what comes up. The words that appear are frequently-searched words/phrases, and you can put them to work on your website.
  

The first internet search engines came about in the very early 1990s, and marketers quickly went to work gaming the system. See, at that time, search engines ranked websites only by how many times a user’s query word or phrase happened to appear on those sites. So what did web copywriters do?

They stuffed their sites with keywords—literally copying them over and over again in the middle of the text. It didn’t matter that the copy didn’t make sense. It didn’t matter than a poor, unsuspecting consumer who had typed in “how to change a furnace filter” found themselves reading a paragraph with “honeywell filter, honeywell filter, honeywell filter” repeated ad nauseum.

What mattered—back then, anyway—is the search engines found their site, consumers clicked on their sites, and advertisers were thrilled with the traffic to those sites. As a result, marketers made a ton of money—and consumers were left wondering how in the world to fix their furnace.

In the late 1990s, a couple of guys from Stanford University decided that was ridiculous, and they began developing a system to ensure consumers got quality search results. There’s a lot more to that story, but the bottom line is this: Keyword stuffing gets you nowhere but the bottom of the results page.

Yes, you still want to use keywords. But you want to use them wisely, in ways that Google will see as meaningful and helpful.

This is a quick one. The best SEO isn’t limited only to the main copy on your website. Google looks at everything : the URL, page titles, alt attributes (the information about photos and videos on your site), and headings. So use keywords wherever you can.

OK, we just advised against keyword stuffing. But there’s a difference between using keywords too frequently on one page of your site and using them often—across multiple pages and across time. SEO algorithms require you to continually produce fresh, meaningful content. You’ll obviously have some static content on your site (your “contact” or “about” page, for example), but you can keep Google happy by creating and sharing engaging content through a blog.

These four SEO tips are a great start, but the truth is we’ve just scratched the surface. In addition to keywords, SEO involves website load times, authority, trackbacks, domain trust, link anchors, and a whole bunch more. We’d love to help you take your website to the next level, get you more business, and help you be more profitable. Give us a call today.

Levergy is the industry leader in marketing for Plumber & HVAC companies . If you're ready to stop wasting money on marketing that isn't working and start making more money, give us a call today!