HVAC backlinks: what 45 number one rankers actually have

We took the number one Google map-pack result for "hvac contractor" in the 50 largest cities in America, then pulled every backlink pointing at each one. 430,066 links. 38,670 referring domains. 1,564 unique linking domains classified by hand into ten categories, because no tool does that part for you.

The point was to answer a question that gets guessed at constantly and measured almost never: what does the link profile of a business already winning in HVAC actually look like?

Some of it is reassuring. Most of it is not what agencies sell.

1. Most of your backlinks are not backlinks

Rank every referring domain by how many of these 42 businesses carry it, and the top of the list is not the Better Business Bureau. It is hvacservice.io, an auto-generated directory that 90% of them have and none of them signed up for. Second is smartacsolutions.com at 79%. BBB - the first link on the list anyone actually earned - is third.

Almost every business in the sample carries between 440 and 700 referring domains at 80 to 90% nofollow, regardless of size, age or budget. A one-van operation in Wichita and a 7,500-review company in Minneapolis have near-identical counts. That uniformity is not organic. It is a network of .shop and .store domains spraying links across the entire industry.

Filter out flagged spam and everything below Domain Rating 20, and the numbers collapse:

Boston HVAC ranks number one in Boston on a link profile that is 100% junk. Not "mostly". All of it.

What to do: before you benchmark yourself against anyone, apply the filter to both sides. Most "we have 600 backlinks" claims survive it at around 50, and so will your competitor's.

2. A quarter of number one rankers have no real links at all

11 of 42 businesses - 26% - hold the top map-pack spot in their city with zero links from a manufacturer, chamber, local news outlet, community organisation or utility program. Not few. None.

This is the part most agencies will not say out loud, so here it is plainly: the map pack and organic search are different games. Proximity, categories and review volume drive the map pack. Links drive organic. Several businesses in this sample rank number one locally while pulling essentially no organic traffic - one gets two visits a month, another gets zero.

That does not make links pointless. It makes their job specific. Links are not what wins you the map pack. Links are what gets you found outside a three-mile radius, which is where the rest of the metro is.

3. The strongest signal in the study is where your links point

Not how many links you have. Not how authoritative they are. What share of them point at pages other than your homepage.

Correlation between deep-link share and organic traffic: rho +0.93. Nothing else measured came close - not Domain Rating, not review count, not total backlinks.

Every business above 40% is doing the same thing: one real page per city they serve, with links pointed at those pages instead of the homepage. Goettl's Las Vegas location page alone carries 282 referring domains, more than most businesses in this study have in total. Michael & Son has a page each for Raleigh, Norfolk, Baltimore, Richmond, Charlotte and Alexandria, and all six earn links independently.

The two at the bottom have no single page earning more than three referring domains. Both rank for under 30 keywords in total.

What to do: build a real page for each city or suburb you serve. Not a doorway page with the city name swapped - an actual page with your local jobs, technicians and reviews on it. Then when a chamber, a sponsor or a supplier links to you, ask them to point at that page rather than your homepage. It costs nothing extra and almost nobody does it.

4. The best links in the trade are free and mostly unclaimed

Strip out the directories and the spam, and the genuinely strong profiles cluster in five categories. The interesting column is not the biggest number - it is the smallest.

Manufacturer dealer locators, 36%. These are the highest-authority pages an HVAC contractor can realistically get linked from - carrier.com at DR 84, lennox.com at 79, bryant.com at 75. Topically perfect, permanent, free. Two-thirds of the market has never asked. Email your distributor rep today; if you are an authorised dealer you almost certainly already qualify.

Utility and energy programs, 19%. The most under-used link in the industry. Efficiency programs publish participating-contractor lists - Xcel Energy at DR 79, Focus on Energy at 72. Free to join if you already install qualifying equipment.

Community and sponsorship, 45%. Standard Heating has links from the Guthrie Theater, Minnesota United, a farmers market, a community college and three youth sports leagues. You are probably already sponsoring something like this. You just never asked for the link.

Chamber of commerce and local news round out the list. Local news is the strongest marker of a competitive profile in the whole dataset, and it is earned the boring way - a reporter needs a heat-wave quote every July, and somebody has to be the one who picks up.

5. The real pace of winning is five links a month

Tracking referring domains monthly over two years gives the most reassuring number in this study. Once you strip the spam out, the median winner adds five real referring domains a month. The apparent rate, before filtering, is 120.

Five a month is one chamber listing, one sponsorship, one manufacturer profile. That is a Tuesday, not a campaign.

The alternative is visible in the data too, and it does not work. Three distinct ways of buying a profile showed up - guest-post blog networks, press-release syndication, and contractor link rings where unrelated trades cross-link each other. BullsEye Plumbing has 991 referring domains and a Domain Rating of 7. HVAC Philly has 656 referring domains and zero organic traffic. Meanwhile Jacobs Heating, with an earned profile of a similar size, pulls 3,218 visits a month. Google is not being fooled by any of it.

Two things to use on your competitors

A perfect 5.0 rating is a warning sign. Across all 47 listings, review count and star rating are negatively correlated - rho -0.51. Every perfect 5.0 in the sample belongs to a listing with under 100 reviews. Goettl sits at 4.7 across 14,360 reviews. Chase volume, not perfection.

Photos divided by reviews is a fake-listing detector.

Photos are free to upload. Reviews are not. Every thin, likely-manufactured listing in this sample posts more than one photo per review, and every established operator posts fewer than a tenth of one. Handy the next time a client asks why a company nobody has heard of is outranking them.

The honest caveat

Every business in this study already ranks number one, so there is no ranking variation to correlate against. These figures describe what a top-ranking HVAC business looks like. They do not prove what causes the ranking. Establishing that would mean pulling positions two and three in each city and comparing. Anyone presenting data like this as proof of causation is overselling it.

Which is also why the companion study is worth reading: we ran the same question across 998 companies at every rank position, where there is variation to measure, and links come out weaker than almost anyone expects.

The short version

Build a page for every city you serve and point your links at those pages. Audit your own profile with the spam filter on. Email your distributor about the dealer locator. Join the chamber. Ask for a link from the things you already sponsor. Get on your utility's contractor list. Chase review volume rather than a perfect score.

That is roughly five real links a month, aimed at the right pages - which, according to the businesses already ranking number one in the biggest cities in America, is exactly the pace of winning.

If you want us to run this filter on your profile and your three closest competitors, book a call. If you would rather read more first, the analysis of 17,241 HVAC customer reviews covers what happens after they find you.