Ten residential and light commercial HVAC contractors at a time. Local SEO reported on the calls that turned into jobs, not the rankings that didn't.
Most HVAC SEO agencies will not tell you what they charge, who does the work, or what happens when you leave. This page answers all three before you book anything.
Max 10 clients at a time. No monthly contracts. No setup fee.
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Thumbtack
ACCA
The short version
What HVAC SEO services actually include
For a residential HVAC contractor, the Google map pack and the first three organic results are where nearly all the calls come from, which is why HVAC SEO is a local SEO problem before it is a content problem.
The work is mostly local: Google Business Profile optimization, map pack visibility, service and city pages that answer real questions, online review generation, technical SEO on the site itself, and local citations and link building.
The HVAC SEO services on this page cover all of that and more, so your heating and cooling company is the one homeowners find when they search for repair, replacement or maintenance in your service area.
A lot of what a general digital marketing agency sells to HVAC contractors is national search engine optimization wearing a work shirt: blog posts about how a heat pump works, keyword reports, backlink counts.
None of it moves the Google map pack. When a homeowner's AC quits in August, they search, they tap one of the first few listings, and they call whoever picks up.
Everything worth doing works backwards from that moment.
Scope
What's included in our HVAC SEO services
The mix depends on what you already have. A contractor with a six-year-old HVAC website and a half-finished Google profile needs different work from an HVAC company with a clean site and 400 reviews. But every SEO campaign here is built from the same set of pieces.
The nine pieces, in short
Google Business Profile optimisation
Categories, services, service area, photos, Q&A and posts, configured rather than half-filled.
Local map pack visibility
Grid tracking across the service area, so you can see where you rank town by town instead of at one address.
Service pages
AC repair, furnace repair, heat pump installation, maintenance plans, emergency service - one page per job people search for.
Location pages
One per town you actually serve, written from local detail rather than find-and-replace.
Technical SEO
Mobile speed, crawlability, internal links and structured data on the site itself.
Review generation and reputation management
Built into how your techs close a job. Bundled in, never billed as an add-on.
Local citations
Name, address and phone matching exactly across the directories and data aggregators Google cross-checks.
Link building
Trade associations, manufacturer dealer listings, chambers of commerce and local press. No private blog networks.
Call tracking and reporting
Call to booked job to revenue, as far as your CRM will let the numbers travel.
Google Business Profile optimization and the Google map pack
Your profile is the single highest-leverage asset you own, and most contractors have it half-configured. Categories, services, service area, hours, description, photos, products, Q&A, and the review flow all feed how you show up in Maps and the local pack.
We audit the whole thing, fix what's wrong, and keep it current, because a profile that goes stale stops performing within a couple of months.
Google publishes the rules for what a profile may and may not claim, and they are worth reading before anyone touches yours: Google Business Profile guidelines.
Service and location pages that aren't doorway pages
You need pages for the work people actually search for: AC repair, furnace repair, heat pump installation, maintenance plans, emergency service, system replacement, indoor air quality.
And if you cover several towns, you need pages for those too.
What you don't need is the same three paragraphs with a different city name pasted in. Those pages don't help a homeowner decide anything, and Google has been discounting them for years.
A location page earns its place when it says something true about that market: what you cover, how fast you get there, what the housing stock is like, who on your team runs those calls.
Technical SEO on the website itself
Technical SEO is the unglamorous half: page speed on a phone on a job site, crawlable pages, clean internal links, no duplicate service pages competing with each other, and structured data so a search engine can read what you do and where you do it without guessing.
It is also what gives you a shot at Google AI Overviews, which lift clean, clearly structured answers out of pages rather than paragraphs of preamble.
Most HVAC websites I inherit have two or three technical problems holding everything else back. They get fixed in month one, before anyone writes a word of new content, because a fast, crawlable site makes every other part of the SEO strategy work harder.
Online reviews and reputation management
Online reviews do two jobs at once. They move local rankings, and they're the last thing a homeowner reads before deciding whether to call you or the next listing.
Reputation management is bundled into the retainer rather than sold as an add-on. I build a review flow into how your techs already close out jobs, so requests go out consistently instead of whenever someone remembers. I'll also help you respond to the bad ones, which matters more than most people think.
Citations and link building
Local citations first: your name, address and phone number matching exactly across the directories and aggregators Google cross-checks. Mismatched details are one of the most common reasons a profile underperforms its reviews.
Then link building, done the slow way. Trade associations, manufacturer dealer listings, local chambers, suppliers, sponsorships and genuine local press. Real HVAC businesses in your area link to other real businesses, and those links hold their value.
What I don't do is buy links from a network, because they work until they don't and you inherit the penalty, not the agency.
Local Service Ads, and when they beat SEO
Local Service Ads sit above the map pack and charge per lead rather than per click. They're worth setting up for most residential contractors, and I'll tell you how, but I don't manage them as a paid channel, because that's Google Ads work and I'm average at Google Ads.
If LSAs are the right answer for your market, you'll hear that on the first call along with what to look for in someone who runs them properly.
Tracking that connects to booked jobs
Call tracking on the website and the profile, so you know which pages and which searches produced the phone call.
Then, where your CRM allows it, the connection from call to booked job to revenue. This is the part most agencies treat as an afterthought and I treat as the point. If I can't tell you which work produced which jobs, we're both guessing.
What I don't sell
Google Ads and social media growth. I'm average at both, and average at spending your money is not a service worth charging for. Your Google Business Profile posts do get reposted to your social pages, because that content is already written as part of the SEO work.
Content marketing is not a separate line item either. The pages that need writing to rank your services and service areas get written as part of the SEO campaign, but I won't run a blog calendar for its own sake.
I also don't do commercial-only HVAC. I don't have the specialization, and you'd be better served elsewhere.
Comparison
How I'm different from every other HVAC SEO agency you'll compare me to
Most SEO agencies take any local business that will sign, hand the account to a rotating account manager, lock you into six to twelve months, and report on rankings and impressions. Honest HVAC Marketing agency takes residential and light commercial HVAC contractors only, caps the client list at ten, has the founder on every call, requires no monthly commitment, charges no setup fee, and reports on the calls that turned into booked jobs.
Honest HVAC Marketing Agency compared with a typical HVAC SEO agency
What matters
Honest HVAC Marketing Agency
A typical HVAC SEO agency
Who they take on
Residential & light commercial HVAC
Any local business that signs
Clients at one time
Maximum of 10
As many as sales can close
Who does the work
A small team - founder on every account
A rotating account manager
Commitment
No monthly commitment required
Six to twelve month lock-ins
Setup fee
None
$1,000 to $10,000 to build
Pricing
Published on this page
"Contact us for a custom quote"
Who owns the website
You do, and it moves with you
Held on their platform
What gets reported
Calls that became jobs
Rankings, impressions, leads
When it isn't a fit
You hear it on the first call
You find out at month three
Channels they won't run
Google Ads and social media growth
None, everything is in scope
The team
Who does the work
Shaurya Jain. That's the answer to the question every agency's FAQ dodges.
Honest HVAC Marketing is a small team - four to six people, ten clients maximum. I oversee every account personally, and the team is deliberately kept small so each client gets proper attention instead of being one name in a queue. You get the person running your account on every call, not an account manager relaying questions to people you never meet.
The trade-off is throughput. I can't turn around six landing pages by Friday the way a forty-person shop can. If your plan needs that kind of volume, say so before you sign and you'll get a straight answer on whether I can do it.
More on how the agency got here is on the about page.
Pricing
What it costs
HVAC SEO retainers in the US typically run $1,500 to $6,000 per month, with website work priced separately and any ad spend on top. Almost no agency publishes a number, which is why you end up on four discovery calls to find out you're out of budget on three of them.
$997per monthResidential and light commercial HVAC local SEO. Starting price - where it lands depends on how many towns you cover. No setup fee, no monthly contract.
Where it lands above that depends on how many towns you're covering and what condition the website is in. If the site needs rebuilding before any of this is worth paying for, HVAC website design is priced separately and published on its own page.
No sales team, no account managers, no setup fee to fund - the retainer only covers the work. Ten clients and a small team means every account gets the hours it actually needs, not a production-line allocation.
Before you sign with anyone, ask three questions:
Who does the work day to day, by name?
What do I own if I leave: the website, the content, the tracking number, the ads account?
What happens when I want out: notice period, and what comes with me?
If the site, the phone number and the ads account all stay with the agency, the retainer isn't the real price. The real cost is what it takes to walk away.
Seen enough to talk?
Fifteen minutes. I'll look at your market, tell you where you stand, and whether local SEO is the right channel right now.
Local SEO for an HVAC contractor takes three to six months. There is no version where it doesn't.
Month one is fixing what's broken and getting your Google profile in order. Calls usually start ticking up by the end of month two. The compounding, the part where you stop paying for every lead, shows up closer to month six.
Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either counting keywords nobody searches or buying links that will cost you later.
Google says the same thing in plainer words: no one can guarantee a number one ranking. If you need work booked next week, say so on the first call and I'll point you at Facebook ads instead, which turns on in days.
After eight weeks of Honest HVAC Marketing local SEO work, the grid for a residential HVAC contractor in Greenwood, Indiana showed average Google Business Profile position moving from 16.82 to 8.33 and top-three placements moving from zero to 28.99 percent of the grid.
This is a month-two visibility snapshot, not a booked-job claim. The booked-job numbers are not in yet, which is why they are not shown. The compounding effect and booked jobs that follow are still ahead of this scan.
Reporting
What I report on
Calls that turned into jobs.
Not impressions. Not the number of links built. Not a screenshot of the three keywords that happened to go well, chosen by an agency that also chose which ones to show you. Any of those can be made to look good in a month where nothing happened, and most of the industry knows it. A full grid scan like the one above is a fair measure because nobody picks the squares; a single ranking screenshot is not.
Each month you get: how many calls came in from organic search and the Google profile, which pages and searches produced them, how many turned into booked jobs, and what changed since last month. Where your CRM lets us connect it, revenue too. If a month was bad, the report says the month was bad.
AI search
HVAC SEO and AI search
Appearing in AI answers is a different problem from ranking. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity assemble answers from sources they already trust, so the lever is brand mentions across the web from credible places: trade directories, manufacturer and association pages, local press, review platforms, genuine third-party roundups, plus content structured so a machine can lift a clean answer out of it.
For an HVAC contractor that means three things: business details that match everywhere they appear, real reviews in volume, and pages that answer one question directly instead of burying it six paragraphs down. Most of that is covered by Google Search Essentials, which has not changed much for the AI era.
The honest version of where this stands: nobody has years of data on what wins in AI answers, because the systems are two years old and change monthly. Anyone selling you a guaranteed "AEO package" is selling you a guess. What I do know is that the same work, consistent business information, real reviews, clear pages, genuine third-party mentions, feeds both the map pack and the AI answers. So it's not a separate line item on the invoice.
Before you book
Five things I'd rather you heard from me
Every agency has a list like this. Most let you find out in month three.
I'm average at Google Ads and social media growth, so I sell neither.I'm good at three things: local SEO for HVAC contractors, which includes your Google Business Profile, online reviews and reputation management; Facebook ads; and building sites that turn visitors into calls. If either of the others is what you need, you'll hear that on the first call, along with what to look for in someone who does it properly.
I use AI in my process, and I won't pretend otherwise.I use it to do more work, not cheaper work: reading competitor pages and search data at a volume nobody has time for, drafting more variations to test, turning research around in days instead of weeks.
A person edits, checks and signs off on everything that goes live.
The client list is capped at ten, so sometimes the answer is no.The cap is what keeps nobody getting the leftovers, and it means I occasionally turn down work I'd like to take. If I'm full when you call, you'll be told that on the call rather than sold a waitlist.
Local SEO takes three to six months.Covered above. Worth repeating because it's the promise most often broken to win the deal, and because deciding at week six is the most common way contractors waste the first month's work.
It's a small team, and that cuts both ways.Four to six people, ten clients. I oversee every account and you talk to the people doing the work. You don't get a forty-person production line, and you can't have six landing pages by Friday.
Fit check
Who this is for, and who it isn't
A good fit if
Someone owns the phone. A named person answers or calls back the same day. I can hand them qualified leads.
You judge in months. You read the pipeline month over month and give a channel at least three months before deciding.
You know your numbers, or you want us to build that tracking with you: cost per call, call to booked job, average ticket.
You want an opinion. You'd rather hear that your home page is the problem than be told what you hoped for.
Not a fit if
You've had four agencies in twelve months and no appetite to sit with a process this time.
Calls sit in a voicemail box for two days. More of them will not help you.
You're commercial-only HVAC. I don't have the specialization.
You're closed to feedback. You want a second opinion validated before you'll act on it.
Proof
Testimonials
Unscripted, recorded by the business owners themselves.
Two long interviews on other people's shows, neither of them mine to edit. If the position on this page only held while I was pitching, this is where it would come apart.
Interviewed by Nicholas Kuhne
Interviewed by John Wright
Before you hire anyone
How local SEO works, explained in full
Three short videos: how the map pack picks who to show, what reviews actually do, and what moves rankings versus what only looks like it does. Watch them and you can judge any HVAC SEO agency you speak to, this one included.
Research and straight talk
The SEO research and advice behind what you just read
Everything on this page comes out of data we collected ourselves: what 430,066 HVAC backlinks actually look like, what ranks 998 companies across 46 markets, and what 17,241 customers say once the job is done. Plus two videos on why HVAC SEO campaigns actually fail, and what fixes it.
What 17,241 HVAC customer reviews reveal
Every review of 95 contractors in five cities, read rather than counted. 60.8% of reviews that name a price are negative.
The pattern we see across failed HVAC SEO contracts, before you're three months in and stuck.
5 marketing truths every HVAC business owner needs to hear
What actually drives HVAC leads, said straight instead of sold to you.
Buyer's checklist
How to choose an HVAC SEO agency
Ask six questions before you sign.
Who does the work day to day, by name?
What do I own if I leave: website, content, tracking number, ads account?
What will you report on, and does it connect to booked jobs?
How many other HVAC companies do you have in my market?
What won't you do, and what are you bad at?
How long before I see calls, and what happens in month one?
Question five is the one that matters. An agency that can't answer it straight will not answer the others straight either.
Questions I get
HVAC SEO services FAQs
What does an HVAC SEO agency do?
An HVAC SEO agency gets your heating and cooling company found by homeowners searching in your service area. For residential contractors that's mostly local work: Google Business Profile optimization, map pack visibility, service and location pages, review generation, local citations, and call tracking that ties rankings back to booked jobs.
How much does HVAC SEO cost?
Retainers in the US typically run $1,500 to $6,000 per month, with website work priced separately. Ours starts at $997 per month for residential and light commercial HVAC local SEO, with no setup fee and no contract. Where you land above that depends on how many towns you cover and the condition of your website.
How long does HVAC SEO take to work?
Three to six months. Month one is fixing what's broken and getting your Google Business Profile in order. Calls usually start ticking up by the end of month two. The compounding shows up closer to month six. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is counting keywords nobody searches.
Is HVAC SEO worth it, or should I run ads instead?
It depends on when you need the work. Facebook ads and Local Service Ads produce calls within days but stop when you stop paying. SEO takes three to six months and then compounds. If you need jobs booked this month, start with ads. If you're building for next year, start with SEO. Most contractors eventually run both.
Do I need a page for every town I serve?
Only if the pages are useful. A location page earns its place when it says something true about that market: what you cover, response times, the housing stock, who runs those calls. The same three paragraphs with a different city name pasted in doesn't help a homeowner and won't hold a ranking.
Who will actually be doing the work on my account?
A small team of four to six people. I oversee every account personally, and the team is capped at ten clients so each one gets real attention. There's no account manager relaying questions, and nothing gets handed to a junior.
What happens to my website and rankings if I leave?
The website is yours and it moves with you: the code, the content, the domain, the tracking number. There's no monthly contract and no notice period to serve out. Rankings you've built stay with the site.
Does HVAC SEO still matter with AI search and AI Overviews?
Yes, and the work overlaps. AI answers are assembled from sources the system already trusts, which means consistent business information, real reviews, credible third-party mentions and clearly structured pages. That's the same work that wins the map pack, so it isn't a separate service.
How much does it cost to hire someone to do SEO?
Across all industries, agency SEO retainers usually run $1,000 to $5,000 a month, freelancers $500 to $2,000, and one-off project work $2,000 to $10,000. Hourly consulting sits around $100 to $200. The range is that wide because SEO is a label for a dozen different jobs, and nobody has to tell you which one they are actually doing.
What matters more than the number is what sits under it: who does the work, what gets built that you keep, and what you are shown each month. My own pricing for HVAC is on this page rather than behind a call.
What is the difference between HVAC SEO and local SEO?
Local SEO is the general practice of ranking a business in a specific place: the map pack, the Google Business Profile, citations, reviews. HVAC SEO is local SEO applied to a trade where the searches are emergency-led, seasonal and priced very differently from one another.
In practice they are the same work with different targets. A no-cool call in August and a full system replacement come from different searches, convert at different rates and are worth different amounts, so the pages, the reviews and the tracking are built around those jobs rather than around traffic.
Book an advisory call
Fifteen minutes. You'll get a straight read on whether local SEO is the right channel for where your business is right now, and if it isn't, you'll hear that instead. There's a maximum of ten clients at a time, so if I'm full you'll be told that on the call rather than sold a waitlist.
