HVAC companies refer to all companies and contractors involved in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning business. HVAC companies are very diverse both in product/service offerings as well as their size. Regardless of their area of specialization or size, all these companies can benefit immensely from SEO strategies. In this article, we explore the rising importance of search engine optimization and how companies can benefit from optimizing their websites via HVAC SEO best practices.
Changing Face of The Industry
For many years, HVAC companies relied on print and television platforms to advertise. The effect of this is that the larger HVAC companies that had massive advertising budgets always had an edge over their smaller competitors who could not afford to flood the traditional media with advertising. The advent of the internet and its explosion into our daily lives changed all that. Many people could not simply search for HVAC companies near their home and simply contract them to do what they wanted to be done. While this trend has been on the rise, the COVID-19 pandemic as further pushed most of the advertising and buying online. Many people limit their movements and simply prefer to look for HVAC contractors online and place any orders they may have there.
What this means for HVAC is that SEO has become a life or death process. No longer can SEO be left to the geeky guys in the basement office while the marketing department gets the bulk of the advertising budget. Any HVAC company that wants to survive and grow must take digital marketing seriously and at the core of this is SEO strategies. Here are some of the elements of a sound SEO strategy.
Getting Keywords Right
To get SEO right, it is important to understand the keywords and phrases that your clients are using. This means that you must be able to understand the words and phrases that your potential clients are using. These are then incorporated into your website to ensure that search engine bots list your website higher in search results. It is also important to point out that these keywords and phrases cannot just be crammed randomly in your content. Instead, they must be used as part of a broader strategy to offer potential clients useful information regarding the services that your company offers. Cramming them randomly actually has the opposite effect and your search result listing suffer from such actions.
There are many ways of getting keywords and phrases that are relevant to your area of business. Google AdWords is a great way to do this, especially because they do not charge you for analytics regarding any keyword that you are considering. Google AdWords is able to tell you how frequently that phrase is used in search processes as well as how competitive it is.
Individual Page Optimization
When you are optimizing your website for better search engine ranking, it is important to ensure that each page on your website is optimized differently. This approach takes cognizant of the fact that many people search for what they need differently. For example, individuals looking for heating services might use words such as ‘boiler’ and so on. It is quite possible that the word ‘heating’ might not be used at all. On the other hand, potential clients looking for ventilation solutions might inadvertently lump their search processes under air conditioning. If you offer these different services and have not optimized each service page to reflect what your clients might actually look for, it is easy to miss out on great leads.
It is also important to remember that not all clients visit your website with a concrete goal in mind. Many visitors often stumble across websites and if they like the content, will probably reach out when they are in need of your services.
Content Matters in HVAC SEO
When it comes to HVAC SEO strategies, content makes all the difference. Having useful and relevant content on your website helps in a variety of ways. For starters, Google search results tend to rank websites that have useful content higher than those that don’t. The second thing to understand is that in its rankings, Google bots check which sites are shared often or have backlinks to other websites. The more backlinks there are, the more Google ranks your website higher because it assumes that people are backlinking due to the relevance of the information. Another thing that makes content critical to any SEO strategy is the fact that people appreciate it when a company takes the effort to educate them about their products or services. Most people are not experts when it comes to HVAC products and services. For this reason, a HVAC company that undertakes to teach potential clients about how to care for a boiler or how to detect problems with the AC system is more likely to get sales leads from prospective clients.
Understand Your Niche
While Google AdWords and other tools might be great for identifying the catchphrases that are used in your industry, they might not be enough to fully optimize your website. For this reason, it pays to talk directly to your customers and listen to how they describe your products and services. Listen out especially for unique phrases and words that they may use to describe various products. It is important to understand that some of these words and phrases may vary from region to region and so this might inform how you optimize each individual page. Another important reason to engage clients is to discover what kind of problems they face with the products and services that you offer. There are two important reasons for doing this. The first is the fact that these problems can be addressed in your web content through blogs and the appropriate keywords inserted. The other benefit of this is that it helps improve your keyword list. This is because some people tend to phrase their search queries as ‘solutions to problems’. For example, someone is likely to search ‘repair for spoilt boiler in Jersey City.’ Understanding this allows you to fashion your content appropriately.
Use Readable URLs
When optimizing your website, you should consider using shorter URLs that are more descriptive. For example, avoid URLs that do not mention the subject matter of the page and that may sometimes end in numerical figures. Whenever possible, ensure that the URL contains the keyword that pertains to the subject matter on the page. However, do not try to force the keyword into the URL unless it is a logical fit.
When it comes to SEO, HVAC companies have a lot to gain by talking to experts. Companies that specialize in digital marketing bring on board a wealth of experience that takes the guesswork out of your SEO strategies. Such companies are able to see the bigger picture when it comes to SEO and can integrate elements of E-commerce and much more into your SEO strategies. Another advantage of working with digital marketing experts is that they help you get more out of strategies such as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing which have a great effect on your SEO ranking. Finally, working with digital experts allows you to learn from web analytics and develop strategies to incorporate these lessons into your everyday SEO strategy. Many of these companies are able to develop blog content for you and generally maintain your website. This way, you can focus on your key business with the peace of mind that your online strategy is being executed with maximum efficiency.
