Own the map before the heat wave.

Profile and review work often moves map visibility inside 30 to 90 days, and that is where the fastest calls come from. Service-area pages and authority build more slowly, so we plan on six to nine months for organic to carry a real share of the schedule. We show grid rankings monthly so progress is visible long before the revenue line moves.

Scope it from your service area rather than from a price list. For context, standard HVAC SEO retainers in 2026 run $1,500 to $3,500 a month. We would rather own five towns properly than spread the same budget across twenty and rank in none, and we will tell you which of those your budget actually buys before you commit.

For this trade it is the centre of the whole programme. Profile signals carry 32% of local pack ranking weight and reviews another 16%, and the Local Pack appears on 100% of core service and near-me home services searches. Half the outcome sits in two things you control, which is unusually good news.

With service-area pages that earn their place, plus profile service areas, local proof and links from that community. It is slower than ranking where your office sits, and we say so up front. What we will not do is publish thirty near-identical town pages, because that approach stopped working years ago and puts the rest of the site at risk.

Both, and the second one is underrated. Review signals are 16% of local pack weight, but they also decide which of the three map results gets the call. We build the asking routine into your job close and answer every review, including the awkward ones, in a tone that reads like your company rather than a template.

It matters for rankings and it matters more for bookings. The mean mobile LCP across 104 HVAC sites is 8.35 seconds against Google's 2.5 second good threshold, which is a long time to stand in a hot hallway. Speed work is usually one of the first things we do, because it lifts organic and paid results at the same time.

Paid buys demand today, organic lowers what tomorrow costs. The blended paid cost per paying HVAC customer across 816 contractors is $472, and every organic call you win is one you did not buy at that price. Most of our clients run both, with our HVAC PPC team covering the emergency season while the organic base builds.

They are becoming part of it rather than replacing it. 83% of homeowners start online and 22% now use AI tools such as ChatGPT to research or find recommendations. The work that earns AI mentions is largely the same work that earns rankings — clear pages, real reviews, consistent data — and we pair it with GEO and AEO where clients want to push harder there.

Calls, forms, booked work and grid rankings by town, with a short written note on what moved. Call measurement matters here because phone calls are 70 to 80% of home services leads; a report built only on form fills describes a fraction of the business. We also flag what did not work that month, which is usually the more useful half.

Yes, and we start by interviewing your technicians and service manager. The details that make a page rank and convert — what a two-stage system actually costs to install here, why a heat pump struggles below a certain temperature, what happens on a same-day call — are in their heads, not in a keyword tool.

Common, and it changes the site architecture rather than the strategy. Each trade needs its own section, its own service pages and often its own profile categories, so the company does not end up ranking as a generalist for everything and a specialist in nothing. We plan the structure before anything gets written.

Ask three things: who does the work day to day, what they will show you each month, and what happens to the website and content if you leave. An agency reporting impressions is measuring its own activity. One reporting calls and booked work by town is measuring your business, and everything it builds should stay yours.

Yes, in a defined area first. Established competitors are hard to displace everywhere at once, but they are usually weak in specific towns and specific services — heat pumps, indoor air quality, commercial maintenance. We pick the winnable ground, take it, then widen. Trying to compete everywhere on day one is how small budgets disappear.

Yes, with admin rights on both, plus your analytics and search console. If a previous agency holds those accounts we will help you recover ownership first — it is a common situation and worth sorting out before any work starts, because you should own every asset the programme depends on.

Audit and grid baseline, profile rebuild, citation clean-up, the first round of technical fixes and call measurement. You get the findings and the content plan in writing, with the towns and services ranked by what they are worth. Content publishing starts in month two once the foundation holds.

A named senior SEO strategist who also joins the monthly session, working with a writer who has interviewed your team. You will know who is doing the work and can reach them directly, rather than passing questions to an anonymous queue after the pitch is over.