HVAC local ranking factors: 998 companies, measured

Most claims about local ranking factors come from a survey of SEOs being asked what they think. This one does not.

We took 1,000 HVAC companies across 46 US city markets, recorded where each sat in its market's results, then enriched every one with Ahrefs authority data - Domain Rating, referring domains, backlinks, organic traffic, organic keywords. 998 matched cleanly. Then we correlated each metric against rank position.

The result is more useful than a ranking-factor list, because it tells you which levers are worth pulling and, more importantly, how hard any of them actually pull.

1. Everything is weak. Nothing is above 0.23

Here is the whole correlation table in one picture. Higher bar means a stronger relationship with a better rank position.

At 998 companies, almost everything here is statistically significant - the sample is large enough that even small effects show up as real. But significant is not the same as strong. The single best predictor in the entire dataset clears 0.23. In plain terms: it is a real relationship you would be foolish to ignore, and nowhere near a formula.

This is the finding to hold onto when someone shows you a chart proving that one metric drives local rankings. In this data, no metric drives local rankings. Several nudge them.

What to do: be suspicious of any pitch built on a single lever. If an agency's whole plan is links, or whole plan is citations, the data says they have oversimplified something that does not simplify.

2. Reviews beat links, and it is not close

Review count is the strongest thing measured, at 0.230. The best link metric - dofollow referring domains - comes in at 0.187, and Domain Rating trails at 0.158.

The gap is clearer in the averages by rank position:

Top-three listings carry roughly three times the reviews of listings ranked 21 and below, but only about 1.5 times the Domain Rating. Both metrics move in the right direction. Reviews move about twice as far.

That matters for budget more than for theory. A review-request process is cheap, fast, and entirely inside your control. A link-building program is slow, expensive, and depends on other people saying yes. If you can only do one this quarter, the data says which.

What to do: put a review request at the end of every completed job, in writing, with a link. Not a card in the van. Not "if you have a minute." A text with a link, sent the same day, by whoever closes the ticket.

3. Star rating does essentially nothing

Star rating correlates at 0.037 and is the one metric in the study that fails statistical significance. It is, on this evidence, indistinguishable from noise.

The reason is compression. Almost every HVAC contractor in the dataset sits between 4.3 and 5.0 stars. When everyone scores nearly the same, the score cannot separate anyone. A 4.8 and a 4.9 are the same number as far as the ranking is concerned.

This lines up with what a separate backlink study of 45 number one rankers found from the other direction: review count and star rating are negatively correlated there, and every perfect 5.0 belongs to a listing with under 100 reviews. A flawless rating on a thin listing is a signal of a manufactured profile, not of excellence.

What to do: stop protecting the average. Chasing 5.0 by only asking your happiest customers caps your volume, and volume is the thing that moves. 4.8 across 2,000 reviews beats 5.0 across 30 on every measure in both studies.

4. The average HVAC website has almost no authority - which is the opportunity

Across 961 unique domains, the average Domain Rating is 13.2 and the median is 7.0. A handful of regional and national players drag the mean up. The typical local contractor site carries essentially no independent link authority at all.

Read that as a competitive statement rather than a sad one. The bar in this industry is on the floor. You are not up against sites with hundreds of earned links; you are up against sites with a Domain Rating of 7 and a homepage that has never been linked to by anything except a directory. A modest, genuine effort puts you above most of your market, because most of your market is doing nothing.

What to do: do not benchmark against the national franchise in your city. Benchmark against the four independents actually competing for your jobs, and notice how little it takes to pass them.

5. Organic traffic does not track rank, and that tells you something

One row in the data looks broken until you think about it. Listings ranked 21 and below average higher organic traffic than those ranked 11 to 20.

That is not a real trend. It is a few high-traffic national brands and franchises sitting low in local results while pulling enormous organic numbers, dragging the bucket's average up.

The lesson is the one worth ending on: local ranking and organic traffic are two different scoreboards. A company can dominate organic search nationally and sit at position 24 in your city's map pack. A company with 18 reviews and no links at all can hold position one. Whichever one you are chasing, chase it deliberately, and do not let a report on one flatter you about the other.

What we cannot tell you

Correlation is not causation, and this study cannot establish it. Companies with more reviews and better link profiles almost certainly have other advantages we did not measure - years in business, ad spend, a real sales process, a review system someone actually runs. Any of those could be doing some of the work.

Rank position also comes from row order in a scrape rather than a live re-check, so it is a snapshot. And the technical and firmographic fields were too patchy to include, which means site speed, CMS and company size are simply absent here rather than proven irrelevant.

What the data does support is the shape of the thing: reviews matter more than links, links matter more than nothing, star rating does not matter, and none of it matters as much as the industry claims.

The short version

Ask every customer for a review, every time. Build links steadily but stop treating them as the whole strategy. Ignore your star rating as a ranking lever - and keep it healthy for the reason that actually counts, which is that a human reads it before deciding to call.

If you want to know which of these your market is actually competing on, book a call and we will look at your five closest competitors with you. The study of 17,241 HVAC customer reviews is the natural next read, since reviews turn out to be the lever that matters most here.