As an HVAC contractor, it’s critical to have a steady flow of incoming leads to fill your schedule. How you get these leads has a great impact on your bottom line and ability to grow. Not all leads are created equal and not all leads cost the same. Your margin on a customer depends on the cost to acquire that customer. How did that lead come in? How much did that lead cost? Using matching services such as Angie’s List, Home Advisor, or Thumbtack or relying on advertising such as Google Adwords costs money on a per lead basis. While they can be good options to get leads quickly, those channels are often too expensive to really grow and scale your HVAC business.To efficiently acquire leads and grow your HVAC business, look to ranking your website in organic Google search results. While it takes time, effort, and sometime money to boost your website rankings, each website visitor coming from organic search results are “free,” making it the best long-term answer for getting leads. How do you optimize your site for Google search results? Here are 3 tips to make your HVAC website rank better in google search results.
1) Optimize Your Page SEO Titles
When a customer searches in Google, the results shows a list of websites with a title and a description. The title shown is the website page SEO Title dictated by the code in the website. Depending on how your website is built, your website builder can specify the SEO Title for each page. Google looks to the SEO Title of a website as a key indicator for displaying that result in a Google search, making it critical to setting up your SEO Titles correctly. Try to match your SEO Title to the most relevant and common search query used by customers looking for services like yours.For example, if you’ve identified that your customers often search for ‘Dallas HVAC’ to find businesses like yours, then you want to match your website SEO Title to this query. While it’s tempting to make your SEO Title start with your company name and slogan, it’s not ideal for ranking in search results for relevant queries. Below is an example of an SEO Title for your main website for a Dallas based HVAC Contractor
Dallas HVAC | [Your Company Name]
Take a look at the image below showing the organic search results for the search ‘Dallas HVAC.’ Although a couple of the results are for contractor matching services Yelp and Home Advisor (who spend millions of dollars to rank high across nationally in search results), you’ll notice the other results are for local HVAC contractors. Those HVAC contractor website have SEO Titles that include the search terms of ‘Dallas’ and ‘HVAC,’ making them more likely to show up for this search query. But what if your customers search for specific services you offer? This leads to our next SEO tip for contractor websites…
2) Create Multiple Pages to Match Your Service Offerings
You likely offer multiple different services. If you’re an HVAC contractor, for example, perhaps you offer service calls for repairs, AC tune-ups, and new unit installations. For customer experience, page ranking, and matching search queries, it’s critical to create at least 1 page on your website for each of the services you offer.From a customer experience standpoint, if you can provide more details, photos, examples, etc. of the specific service you offer that they’re looking for on your website, the customer is more likely to contact you for their services. But there’s also an SEO benefit to making these pages. Not only do more pages and more content boost your rankings, but you can match these page SEO Titles with customer search queries to better show up in organic Google searches as discussed in Tip #1.If you have a separate page on your website for Air Conditioner Repairs, AC Tune-Ups, and AC Installations, these pages can rank in customer searches that are specifically looking for this service. Let’s look at ‘Air Conditioner Repairs’ as an example. If customers search in google for ‘Dallas Air Conditioner Repair,’ you should make your SEO Title for that specific service offering page the same: Dallas Air Conditioner Repair | [Your Company Name] When this result shows up in google searches and a customer clicks on it, it will take them directly to a page about your air conditioner repair service. So not only does it help show up in search results, but it takes the customer directly to a page about the service they’re looking for, making them more likely to contact you for this service offering.
3) Add Content To Your Website
“Content” is a vague term, but you have to understand how Google looks at websites when deciding to rank your website in search results. Google looks for indicators that show your website is trustworthy and relevant. There are many factors that play into these indicators, but one of the main factors is the amount of unique, relevant content/material that the website contains.There are 2 main ways to add good content to your website that will help boost your rankings. The first method is to fully build out your main website pages with a lot of information that helps your customers make an informed and educated decision to contact you for your services. As we discussed in Tip #2, creating pages for each offering and filling it with relevant content that helps sell this service to your customer is a form of content that helps show trustworthiness and relevance to Google.The other method of adding unique content to your website is to attach a blog to your website. Your blog posts could range in topics from customer case studies, sample work, educational content related to your work, educating good and bad examples of work, etc. Your blog posts should try to include what your target customers want to see that’s relevant to your business offering.
