Checklist for HVAC contractors
The HVAC local SEO checklist, season by season
An HVAC company gets two rushes a year: the first heat wave and the first cold snap. Local search works the same way. The work you do in the quiet months decides who gets the call when everyone’s air conditioning quits on the same Tuesday.
By Hamza Rivera, updated
One printable page. Nothing to sign up for.
This checklist is the version of our 52-point local SEO checklist written for heating and cooling contractors. Print it, tick it, and run it again each spring and fall.
1 Google Business Profile
- Primary category is the one that matches most of your revenue (for most firms, "HVAC contractor"). Secondary categories cover the rest: air conditioning repair service, furnace repair service, heating contractor. Category names provisional: check each one against the live list in your profile editor before you choose it.
- Every service you sell is listed under Services, with a one-line description: AC repair, AC installation, furnace repair, heat pump installation, duct cleaning, maintenance plans.
- If you work at customers’ homes and do not take walk-ins, the address is hidden and the service area is set to the towns you actually drive to.
- Hours are the hours a person answers. If you take emergency calls overnight, the hours say so.
- Holiday hours are set before every public holiday.
- At least one new photo goes up each month: a finished install, a truck on site, the team. Real jobs beat stock images.
- Posts go up before each season: the spring tune-up, the fall furnace check.
- The booking or contact link goes to a page that loads fast on a phone.
2 Reviews
- Every finished job gets a review request the same day, by text, with the direct review link.
- Every review gets a reply, good or bad, within a few days.
- Replies mention the job naturally ("glad the new heat pump is keeping up") without stuffing town names into them.
- Nobody is paid or rewarded for a review, and reviews are never bought.
3 Name, address and phone everywhere
- The business name, address (if shown) and phone match exactly on the website, the profile, Yelp, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, the BBB and your field service software’s public booking page.
- Old phone numbers and old addresses are corrected wherever they still appear.
- Your license number is on the website and on any directory that has a field for it.
4 The website
- One page per service: AC repair, AC installation, furnace repair, heat pump installation, maintenance plans. Each says what is included and how to book.
- Cooling and heating pages stay live all year. A page taken down in the off-season has to earn its place again when demand returns.
- A page for each main town you serve, with something true about working there (the housing stock, the usual systems, how far out you go). Swapping the town name into the same text does not count.
- An emergency page that says what counts as an emergency and how fast someone calls back.
- Maintenance plans have their own page with what each visit covers.
- Each service page answers the questions customers ask before calling: how long a repair takes, whether you service their brand, what affects the cost.
- Tap-to-call works on every page on a phone.
5 Measurement
- Search Console is connected, and someone looks at the Queries report each month.
- Calls and form inquiries are counted as conversions, separately.
- Profile calls and direction requests are checked in the Business Profile performance view.
- Every spring and fall, compare the same season last year, not the month before.
6 Before each season
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Six to eight weeks before the first heat | Refresh AC pages and photos, post the tune-up offer on the profile, check hours |
| First hot week | Answer reviews daily, make sure the emergency page is current |
| Six to eight weeks before the first cold | Refresh furnace and heat pump pages, post the furnace check |
| Quiet months | Write the town pages, fix citations, ask past customers for reviews |
The audit template
The checks that are the same for every trade come as a spreadsheet, one tab per section, with columns for the result, the evidence and the priority. It is a free Excel download from the local SEO checklist, and it opens in Google Sheets as well.
More for HVAC contractors
The longer guide to local SEO for HVAC contractors covers seasonal spikes, emergency searches and maintenance plans in more depth. If you would rather we did the work, it is set out on the SEO for HVAC contractors page.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply by email.