8 HVAC SEO strategies to improve your online presence

Key takeaways

• Add your service area to every page on your website to make sure you come up in local SEO search results
• Check your site speed to ensure your website loads quickly, add title tags and additional service pages, and optimize mobile phone performance 
• Create social media pages, add your business to online business platforms, and start content marketing to improve your off-site SEO

If you want to attract new customers to your HVAC business, you need to make it easy for those customers to find you online. The best way to do that is with a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that can help you rank higher in organic (unpaid) search results. 

If you master HVAC SEO, you may even get your HVAC company to show up on the first page of search results, which can be a powerful tool for attracting potential customers.

According to Milestone Research, organic search results for local businesses account for 69% of website traffic. By comparison, paid search results (like the kind that come up above the search results in the form of pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising) only account for 8% of website traffic. That means earning more organic traffic should be an important part of your HVAC lead generation strategy.

With a few updates to your website and your broader online presence, you can improve your HVAC SEO rankings and attract new customers online. Here are eight SEO strategies that you can start implementing today to increase your online visibility and earn more organic traffic.

8 HVAC SEO strategies to increase your company’s website traffic

The following strategies are easy for local business owners to implement on their own without hiring an HVAC SEO service or an internet marketing agency to do it. Before you begin, make sure to sign up for Google Analytics so you can see your website’s current SEO metrics and track your progress.

1. Add your service area to every page on your website

One of the most important elements of local SEO is your location. If you want to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people type “HVAC companies near me” into Bing, Yahoo, or Google search, you need to clearly state your service area on every page of your website. This is something that search engine algorithms are looking for when they decide which HVAC businesses will rank in your region.

The best way to incorporate your service area into your company’s website is to add it to either the header or footer. The header and footer already appear on every page of your HVAC website, so putting the information there will allow you to include it without it looking repetitive.

Make sure to include your company name, phone number, and address. If you only serve clients in the city where you’re located, your address will be enough information. But if you have a wider service area, add a statement like “serving Charlottesville, Scottsville, and Waynesboro.” Include the names of all the cities or counties where you provide service.

2. Take a close look at your website’s images

The images on your company’s website aren’t just there for nice-looking web design. They’re an essential ranking factor that affects your site’s SEO. They help break up the text on your webpages and create a better user experience.

There should be at least one image or graphic on every webpage, and preferably more than one. All the images should be high-quality, meaning they’re clear, easy to see, and don’t appear pixelated. You also want to make sure they load quickly when someone visits your website to provide a good user experience. Use a free tool like TinyJPG to compress images so they take up less of your site’s memory and load faster.

Ensure that all of the images on your site are relevant to the HVAC industry and add alt text—a short statement that describes the image and helps visually impaired people navigate your site—to every image on your website. The option to add alt text will come up when you upload a new image to your website’s content management system (CMS).

Alt text won’t show up on your website unless an image fails to load. However, it appears as part of the HTML code on your site and can be read by search engine crawlers (the bots that index your site and determine your SEO ranking).

3. Add title tags to every webpage

Title tags are also known as headings, and they should be part of your website’s text. Every webpage on your site should include a combination of headings and plain text (or paragraphs). In your website’s HTML, title tags appear as H1s, H2s, H3s, and so on.

By using a combination of title tags and plain text on your site, you help search engine crawlers determine which words are most important on each webpage. Your title tags should only be a few words long. Use them to highlight the main ideas on a webpage, then explain those ideas in plain text.

For example, if you have a webpage that provides an overview of the services you offer, you might put the name of a service—like “AC Repair”—in a title tag, then describe the service in a plain-text paragraph below the title tag.

4. Add a landing page for each of your services

If you’re trying to improve your HVAC SEO ranking, having only a homepage isn’t going to cut it. Your website should include several webpages, each with in-depth explanations of the HVAC services you offer. The more webpages you have, the more chances you have to tell search engine algorithms what your site is about.

Create a webpage, or landing page, for each of your services. For example, you might have a page about air conditioning installation, another about AC repair, and another about maintenance. Make sure each page has enough text to fully explain the service—typically, service pages on top-ranked websites have about 500-2,000 words.

Add a meta description for every webpage on your site as well. A meta description is a one-sentence summary of what the webpage is about. Again, this information won’t show up on your webpages, but it will be part of your site’s HTML code, and it will show up on SERPs to tell potential website visitors what they’ll learn if they click on your webpage. You can add your meta descriptions in your website’s CMS.

5. Optimize your site for mobile devices

Many customers search for local services on their phone. According to Statista, nearly 60% of online searches were conducted on mobile devices in the last quarter of 2022. To account for these users, search engine algorithms analyze how responsive your website is—or how well it transitions from one device to another.

Your website needs to look just as good on a mobile phone or tablet as it does on a computer screen, so check out your site on your mobile phone. If part of the text or images are getting cut off, or the site becomes more difficult to read or navigate, then your site isn’t responsive enough.

To fix it, you’ll likely need to choose a new web design template. Make sure any template you choose specifies that it’s responsive and SEO optimized. If you’re not sure how to do this, you can hire a freelance professional from sites like Fiverr or Upwork.

6. Check your site speed

What your site looks like is called its on-site or on-page SEO, but search engine algorithms also analyze your site’s technical SEO. This includes features like how fast your site loads and how easy it is to navigate.

You can check your site speed on a site like PageSpeed or use Google Analytics by selecting “Behavior,” followed by “Site Speed.”

If your site is loading too slowly, try deleting anything in your CMS that you’re not actively using on your site. This could include photos that don’t appear on any of your webpages or plug-ins that you don’t need.

After you’ve taken these steps, check your site speed again to see if it’s improved. If it hasn’t, you’ll need to check your site for bugs and malware, which can infect your site and harm its performance.

If you’re sure your site is free of malware and you’ve removed everything you don’t need from your CMS, but you’re still unhappy with your site speed, you can look into upgrading your hosting package for one with more bandwidth. You’ll need to reach out to your web developer for this.

7. Build your off-site internet presence

Your website’s on-site and technical SEO aren’t the only things that affect your ranking. Your broader online presence—or your off-site SEO—can also help your HVAC website rank higher. By linking back to your website from your social media accounts and online business platforms, you create backlinks that help show search engine algorithms that your business is legitimate.

Backlinks are such an important part of SEO that companies used to spend a lot of money on link building, trying to convince other credible websites to link to their own site. But this practice is controversial, and if you do it incorrectly, you could actually end up hurting your SEO ranking.

Fortunately, local businesses don’t need to do this. In order to rank in local search, simply linking to your website from your other online listings should be enough to improve your off-site SEO.

If you don’t have social media accounts, you should create them. For your HVAC company, start with a Facebook business page and a LinkedIn account. You can also set up an Instagram or Twitter account if you think your business has time to create content for these platforms. At the top of all your social media accounts, make sure to add your business name, phone number, address, and a link to your website.

You should also claim or add your Yelp Business Page and add your business to any online directories that list HVAC contractors. Make sure to include all of the same information (your business name, phone number, address, and a link to your website) on these platforms too.

8. Start content marketing

One of the most effective (though also time consuming) SEO marketing strategies is content marketing. This is where you create high-quality content—like blog posts or YouTube videos—that answer your customer’s questions about their HVAC systems.

To do it effectively, you’ll need to do keyword research to find HVAC-related questions that people are searching for online. You’ll use keyword research tools and pick out target keywords that have a high search volume and low competition (meaning that a lot of people are searching for these terms, but not a lot of websites have content about them).

Then, write a blog or create a YouTube video explaining everything your customers need to know about that question. For example, you might write a blog about the best HVAC systems on the market or how often people need to replace their HVAC systems.

To create a successful content-based SEO campaign, you need to publish content on a regular schedule—like once a week or once a month. Pick a schedule that works for you and stick with it. Slowly, you’ll start to see more website visitors coming to your site to read your content.

Growing your HVAC business with SEO efforts 

Search engine optimization is an important part of any local business’s digital marketing strategy. While the process of optimizing your HVAC SEO may seem daunting, you don’t have to hire an HVAC SEO company to handle it for you. Instead, take it one step at a time.

You can improve your site’s organic search ranking by making small updates to your website, like adding a landing page for each service you offer, including your service area on all your webpages, improving your site images, using a combination of headers and plain text, and checking on your site’s responsiveness and speed.

Then, you’ll be ready to turn your attention to your broader offsite online presence by setting up social media pages, claiming your business on Yelp and other online business platforms, and doing content marketing.

Once you’ve mastered SEO, try these other online marketing strategies for small businesses to attract new customers and grow your business.