HVAC and home services marketing
Local search, Google Ads and Local Services Ads for contractors, measured in booked calls and cost per job, not impressions.
What actually decides who gets the call?
Proximity, reviews and whether somebody answers. Most of the decision happens before anyone reaches your website.
A homeowner with no heat is not comparing brand positioning. They search, look at the map results, read two or three reviews and call the first company that looks competent and close. The Google Business Profile and the review history do most of the work, and the website mainly has to not undermine them.
The other thing that makes this category different is weather. Demand spikes on the first cold snap and the first heatwave, and a budget spread evenly across twelve months underspends exactly when the calls are there to win.
What moves booked jobs
In rough order of effect.
- Google Business Profile and review volume
- Local Services Ads, where they are available
- Search ads bounded by a real service radius
- A phone number that is answered
What usually wastes money
The recurring ones.
- Flat monthly budgets through a seasonal year
- A service radius wider than your trucks
- Lead counts with no call recording behind them
- Chasing brand terms a competitor already owns
What we do
- 01Local searchGoogle Business Profile, reviews, service-area pages and the citations that decide whether you appear in the map results at all.
- 02Google Ads and LSAsSearch and Local Services Ads inside a radius your trucks can actually cover, with budget weighted to the season.
- 03WebsiteFast, mobile, and built so the phone number and the booking form are never more than a thumb away.
- 04Paid socialMaintenance plans and replacement offers aimed at homeowners in your service area rather than the whole metro.
- 05ReportingCalls, booked jobs and cost per booked job, monthly, with the seasonal comparison, not the calendar one.
Work
A commercial HVAC contractor we run search and seasonal campaigns for.
Questions people ask
How much should an HVAC company spend on marketing?
Enough to cover your service radius in the two or three weeks a year when demand spikes, and less in between. A flat monthly budget is the most common mistake in the category: it overspends in shoulder season and runs out exactly when the calls are there.
Do Local Services Ads work better than Google Ads?
They usually cost less per booked job because you pay per lead rather than per click, and the Google Guaranteed badge helps. They are also capped and not available everywhere, so most contractors run both, with LSAs first and search ads covering what LSAs cannot.
How important are reviews for an HVAC business?
They are close to the whole decision. A homeowner picking between three companies in the map results is reading review count and recency before anything else. A steady flow of recent reviews moves more jobs than a website redesign.
How do you measure marketing when jobs are booked by phone?
Call tracking, with recording where the law allows it. Counting form fills alone misses most of the demand in this category, and without listening to a sample of calls you cannot tell a booked job from a wrong number.
Related
Want your numbers in black and white?
Send us your store or your ad account. We'll send back a free audit that says what's working, what isn't and what we'd do first.