Our Heating and Cooling SEO Guide is is meant to inform HVAC marketers about the necessary tips and tricks needed to improve their website ranking. Because of the recent Google algorithm update, it’s more important than ever before to make sure your site is properly optimized for search engines. In this guide, I’ll discuss general best practices as well as specific strategies you can implement into your current strategy. Unfortunately, at this point there isn’t much we can do about that except for staying up-to-date on the changes and making sure our pages are affected as little as possible by any updates.
With these things in mind, let’s get started!
1) Promote Your Company
Social Media Profiles Promoting your business’ social media profiles will not only increase the website’s CTR, but also promote your company to a wider audience. You can do this through creating ads or through normal posts on your profile pages. Your social media profiles should include links back to your site in order to generate traffic and increase SEO rankings.
2) Have At Least One Authoritative Link Directly From The Home Page
Having at least one authoritative link (such as Wikipedia) linking directly to the home page of your site is important because it provides an additional amount of trust for Google. This isn’t anything new; however, you need to make sure that these types of links exist on each page of your website… not just the home page. We’ll discuss more about this later in the article.
3) Create Unique Titles, Descriptions & Headlines
Links are important to have on your page if you want to improve your site’s CTR, but so is text. Google now focuses more on the textual content of a website than it does with backlinks. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t create links at all – there are still many reasons for creating them. However, don’t rely solely on backlinks as this will hurt your rankings.
With that being said, here are some best practices when creating texts for SEO purposes:
-Put keywords in the title
-Make sure titles describe what users can find on the page
-Avoid repeating keywords over and over again
4) Types of Keywords
General Keywords: You will target more general keywords in this group that will likely include the types of services you specialize in that have a higher volume. For example:
HVAC
HVAC contractors
Air conditioning repair
Air conditioning installation
Furnace repair
Furnace installation
The results that appear for those searching in Salt Lake City will differ greatly from those displayed for those searching in Dallas. Although these keywords might seem quite competitive at first glance, realize that Google understands there is a local intent.
Local Geo-Modified Keywords: There are a few keywords that are similar to the above general keywords, but they have a geo-modifier that can be a local city or suburb you are competing in.
As an example, this could be:
[city] air conditioning repair
furnace repair [city]
[city] HVAC contractors
Despite the fact that your rankings will likely be highly correlated between the two groups (if you rank locally for general terms, chances are you’ll also rank for geo-modified terms), knowing there are differences is critical.
Supporting Long-Tail Keywords: You can use these keywords to build a local content strategy and to educate your potential clients. During the research phase, these keywords are usually considered very early in the buying process. You can increase brand awareness and trust during this stage by getting in front of potential clients. Check out our HVAC Keyword Research Guide for more great tips!
You might include the following keywords:
How much does a furnace cost?
When should I clean my chimney?
Do I need to service my furnace?
What is the best air conditioner for a bungalow?
Can I finance a new furnace purchase?
Those who search for one of these might not be immediately ready to call or purchase, but they are actively looking for information about the HVAC industry. The ability to identify these opportunities and develop content will establish you as an authority in your industry while helping to improve overall visibility for other keywords.
This brings me to another point. Search engines can now detect when pages are repeating keywords over and over again, so try to avoid that at all costs. This is one of the reasons why having unique titles, subtitles etc. is important.
5) Write Useful Heating and Cooling SEO Content (At Least 400 Words)
Having useful content on your website helps you rank higher in search engines, as well as encourage visitors to come back to your site at a later date. Users may find it difficult to return if they know there won’t be any new information for them to read about or watch – this becomes very inconvenient for users! This doesn’t mean that you need an entire page of text; however, the least amount of text that Google will accept is around 400 words long. This is why it’s important to have a blog on your website – this way, you can update it regularly with new content.
6) Create Backlinks By Using White Hat Methods
In order to rank high in search engine results, there are a couple things that we need to do. There are some best practices that we can follow in order to get the most out of our link building campaigns, and a lot of them focus not only on creating useful backlinks for Google, but also making sure they’re safe from penalties such as Penguin. Here is an example of what I mean by creating white hat links:
-Use infographics
-Publish case studies
-Create audio or visual (video) content You can also create content on other websites, but make sure it’s of high enough quality to avoid getting penalized.
7) Optimize Your Website For Mobile Users
As you may probably already know, Google ranks sites higher based off of how mobile friendly they are. This isn’t new; however, there are still a lot of websites that haven’t optimized their pages for mobile devices. In order to check if your website is mobile-friendly or not, simply go to google and type in ” does [insert site] have a mobile-friendly website?”. If it doesn’t return any results from Google saying that the site isn’t mobile-friendly to them, then you’re fine! However, if there was a result returned by Google with a link explaining to you why your site isn’t mobile friendly, then you need to do some work. Remember: just because your website is using a responsive template doesn’t mean that it’s optimized for mobile devices!
7) Use Keywords In The Meta Description
We’ve already talked about the importance of keywords in articles and titles; however, we haven’t mentioned much about meta descriptions (we’ll talk about them more later). Google decides which site should rank higher by comparing different factors such as CTR vs. other sites, but one of these factors is also how well SEO’d a website is. This means that Google will visit each page and check for certain elements such as keywords and meta data (meta title, meta description etc.) If there are certain elements that are well optimized, then the site will rank higher in SERPs.
Here is a quick example of what I mean:
– Have meta title and meta description filled out
– Have keywords placed in these spots *Pro Tip: You can use LSI keywords to increase your chances of ranking for certain terms. This means that if you’re targeting ” HVAC SEO “, you could also target ” Heating and Cooling SEO Guide For 2022 “. If people search for one, they’ll most likely search for the former rather than the latter – this is why it’s important to include other forms of your keyword as well!
8) Optimize Your Site By Using Good On-Page Heating and Cooling SEO
This isn’t really anything new, but it’s important to do. On-page SEO is basically making sure that your site follows Google’s guidelines so you can rank higher in search results for certain terms – this just improves overall user experience! If there are things on the page which shouldn’t be there, then they’re known as “no-follow” links – these don’t help you rank at all. Here’s an example of what I mean:
-Ensure that you use relevant keywords in the title of the post as well as within it (make sure they’re not used too often or not at all)
-Use proper internal linking (links to other pages on your own site)