If one thing’s clear, it’s that the HVAC industry isn’t going anywhere.
Each year, Americans spend over $10 billion on HVAC repair and maintenance services, so there’s plenty of demand.
The problem?
Competition in the industry is on the rise, especially in local markets.
In any given city, umpteen HVAC contractors and equipment providers compete for a limited amount of business and achieving visibility and a strong reputation is key to finding success.
Among the different ways to promote HVAC businesses, search engine optimization (SEO) stands out as one of the most effective.
That’s because most people, whether they’re civilians or HVAC contractors, take to search engines like Google to discover new businesses.
According to a report by Visual Objects, 76% of consumers view a business’s online presence before visiting their physical location.
If your HVAC company isn’t ranking in the #1 spot for queries like ‘HVAC equipment near me,’ you’ll lose tons of business to your competitors.
This is the story of how we skyrocketed a HVAC equipment provider’s website traffic by 2.5k in just 6 months.
Their average organic traffic now sits at an impressive 32.8k, which is a value of $10.2k!
They’re also ranking for 8.5k keywords, 730 of which are in the top 3.
How did we do it?
Stay tuned to find out!
The Client: A Reputable HVACR Equipment Provider
Our client is an industry-leading HVACR (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and refrigeration) equipment provider.
They’ve been in the game for over 30 years now, and they’re responsible for some truly game-changing technology.
Needless to say, their business was already humming along.
However, they knew their online presence wasn’t quite where it needed to be. While they weren’t an obscure name by any means, they were getting outranked by their top competitors and couldn’t understand why.
That’s when they decided to get in touch with our team after hearing about the work we did for a similar company.
During our initial consultation, it was clear they were eager to generate more traffic and overtake their competitors on the search rankings.
We decided to pull out all the stops with a Star SEO’s campaign, our fully managed SEO service.
With Star SEO, each client gets hooked up with a dedicated campaign manager. After we kick things off with a comprehensive SEO audit, the manager determines the best course of action for the overall strategy.
Our clients love Star SEO because it places their SEO on autopilot. It’s no secret that SEO is complicated, time-consuming, and downright confusing at times, and it can be too much for business owners to deal with on their own.
Whenever a client gets set up on Star SEO, all those stresses disappear as soon as we take the helm.
In the case of our HVACR client, they were especially grateful to work with our campaign manager who provided them with periodic updates and results.
The SEO Audit: Informing the Rest of the Strategy
We begin every Star SEO’s campaign with an in-depth SEO audit.
What’s that?
An SEO audit is where we analyze the website’s current performance on search engines, including the presence of any glaring errors.
During the audit process, we check for things like:
- Duplicate content (which confuses search crawlers and wrecks rankings)
- Keyword spam
- Missing metadata
- Content readability
- Proper use of header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
- Image alt text
- Adequate speeds for loading, interactivity, and responsiveness
- Orphan pages (web pages that have no internal links pointing at them)
We also request access to the website’s Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts so that we can analyze:
- Their organic traffic
- Keywords they’re currently ranking for
- Their audience’s demographic and geographic breakdowns
Lastly, we also use our own tools to take a look at their backlink profile. In particular, we’re looking for:
- Their main source of backlinks
- Their current authority score
- The total number of backlinks and referring domains
If this sounds like a lot, it’s because it is.
Audits are meant to be intensive, and we don’t pull any punches.
We also keep an eye out for easy win keywords during the audit process, which are keywords the site ranks for in positions 4 – 30. These keywords, with some clever optimization, can start ranking in the top 3 quite quickly – which is where the ‘easy win’ part comes from.
In the case of our HVACR client, their website was pretty much in tip-top shape.
Why, then, were they getting outranked?
It didn’t take us long to discover their main area of weakness: their backlink profile.
The Strategy: Building Backlinks for the Client’s Product Pages
After looking at their backlink profile in comparison to their top competitors, we knew what we had to do.
In particular, our goal was to build as many high-quality links as possible pointing at the client’s priority product pages.
Backlinks, which act as ‘votes of confidence’ for your content, are a crucial ranking factor on Google and other search engines.
Without a high-quality, diverse backlink profile, ranking in the top 3 will become next-to-impossible.
Link-building is one of our top specialties, so we got straight to work.
Here’s a glimpse at the main tactics we used:
- Outreach. We did some digging and found popular HVAC blogs that accept guest posts. After some elbow rubbing, we secured numerous guest blog spots on reputable sites, scoring high-quality backlinks in the process.
- Directory listings. It’s integral for HVAC businesses to appear in relevant business directories, especially local ones. Not only do these provide potential customers with a way to discover your business, but they also provide valuable backlinks.
- Link insertions. Since we wanted to build links pointing at product pages, we knew link insertions were a sure thing. In a nutshell, we found existing articles where mentioning one of our client’s products would be helpful to the website’s users. At the same time, we scored authoritative backlinks.
The Results: 730 Keywords in Top 3, $10.2k Traffic Value, Outranked Competition
After only 6 months on Star SEO, our client saw a 2.5k increase in their organic traffic, which has only continued to soar in the months since.
They now enjoy $10.2k worth of traffic on average, which has led to a vast increase in sales.
Not only that, but they beat out virtually all their competitors on the SERPs, averaging far more traffic than most related companies.
Do you want to replicate these results for your HVAC business?
Star SEO is your ticket to SEO success, so don’t wait to get in touch!
