Top 5 HVAC Seo Mistakes That Cost You Leads (and Sanity)
Written by: Josh Powers
Debuted on: July 30th, 2025
Updated on: No updates yet
Going stark raving mad trying to figure out why SEO for your HVAC business isn’t working?
Digital marketing for small businesses that rely on local customers is simple. It’s not easy, but it is simple.
What do I mean by that? When something’s simple, it’s fairly straightforward. Easy relates to the amount of effort you have to pour into it.
Here, we literally hand over all the methods behind our success to business owners every single day. They work with us anyway, because nobody has the time to juggle all this shit while also running a business.
This is gonna bust your balls a little bit, because these common SEO mistakes are gonna have you thwacking yourself on the forehead before long. Good news is, they’re all fixable.
These are the five most impactful SEO mistakes to avoid for HVAC businesses (and other trades, as well).
#1 Walking in John Wick Style (With No Strategy)
Posting random bullshit isn’t going to garner clicks, and it’s not even going to get you found in search results.
You need direction. I see this all the time: business owners know they need content, or webpages, so they just… make something.
They don’t validate the idea. They don’t analyze their audience (and competitors) to find out if what they’re creating even has value.
Stop doing that. Get some help.
Here’s how you find out what your customers want to read about.
Go to Reddit
Find the subreddits (communities) where your target audience is hanging out
Don’t go to r/HVAC, but r/homeowners would be a good place
Figure out their pain points (that you can solve)
Use a simple SEO keyword research tool, find keywords related to your findings
Make content that solves those pain points
Share that content on social media (this does help with SEO)
But it doesn’t stop there. I won’t bore you, but you need to know about pillar pages. These are long-form pieces of helpful content that have a big SEO presence.
While it’s not a rule, and surely not the only requirement, long-form content = better Google performance because it solves a problem in-depth.
Pillar pages are big. They need supports to hold them up. That’s where this smaller, query-based stuff can help. As long as you link to your pillar page, that is.
So in your strategy, seek to solve big problems that lead to HVAC service calls and leads, in your pillar posts. Then, use smaller content to link to it while also solving smaller problems.
#2 Ignoring Local SEO Like an Evil Step-Dad
“Shit, dad’s home.”
Local SEO is more formulaic than what I call national or global SEO. It’s easier to be the biggest fish in a small pond, you catch my drift?
When you target local SEO, it still matters to have keywords and content. Otherwise people aren’t going to know if you can help them. But the bigger discoverability lever is local SEO.
Let me explain how it’s different:
Results are tethered in proximity, not just relevance: An example is that here at Clarify, we rank for a ton of generic SEO keywords (since it’s a service we offer). But we rank a lot higher for SEO services across our home state of New Hampshire, since our NAP is all over the place.
Near me has weight: Nobody is searching for “near me” in their query unless they, y’know, want results that are physically relevant to their location.
Local keywords have less competition: HVAC is a competitive keyword. People will pay a hundred dollars or more for one person to click on their ad, and ads have to target keywords. We don’t run PPC ads anymore, but we can attest to localized keywords being much cheaper/easier to rank for.
You’re in the map pack: Sometimes it’s called “local pack,” but it’s the same deal. When you perform a Google search, and you add in a town, city, or “near me” modifier, you’ll get a map in your results to show you where locations are. Here’s an example I just did for HVAC services near our Clarify HQ.
If you ignore local SEO, you’re basically signing the death certificate on your business. Here’s the kicker, and I’m not supposed to tell you this because it’s very much against our goal as a business, but I like you.
If you do local SEO, meaning your homepage, service pages, and separate location pages, you may not even need to hire a digital marketing agency.
This, of course, depends on a few things:
If you’re in a mostly remote or low-competition area
If your competitors aren’t doing much local SEO, either
If your goal isn’t to grow the business (some people are happy with their current workload)
Here’s where I’ll interject, though: you don’t want to get complacent with your SEO just because your competitors are slacking.
You want to get so fucking far ahead of them, they look around and go, “How can I compete with this?”
I know this, because I work with businesses like this all the time, and we drag them from last place to the finish line before the front-runner knows what hit ‘em.
I’m always going to advocate for bringing a Marketing Partner on board, but that’s because it’s not just about being found now, it’s about how you’ll be found later.
It’s never the case that putting something off now results in no consequences later. You don’t know what’s coming, neither do I, so it’s best to be in a good position for algorithm changes and come-what-may.
#3 Stuffing Keywords Into Your Pages Like I Stuff Pizza Rolls Into My Face
I can pack those things away, I really can.
If you just rip 40-100 keywords from a keyword research tool, and inject them into the page without really knowing what you’re doing, Google is going to flag your content as spam.
They may even remove it from indexing, which means nobody is going to find it in organic search. That hurts your visibility and your reach.
Be strategic, and know that you don’t have to land for every single keyword. I’ll give you an example.
I could copy and paste all these keywords into different articles, clap my hands together like a mentally unsound monkey with two cymbals, and call it a day.
But that wouldn’t serve a purpose. I would get more impressions in Google Search Console, sure, but then I’m just going to lose the plot.
People won’t find me for the specific reasons I need them to. In fact, sometimes I have to look at data, go into articles (like this one), and actually delete keywords. Sometimes, things come out in organic writing that I rank for, when I didn’t want to.
It actually ends up in more people clicking on my articles, on average, which means actual visibility and not just vanity metrics.
#4 Flipping the Bird to Technical SEO
You know your cousin Teddy, who’s always talking about building birdhouses at the family barbeque? Isn’t he fucking boring to listen to?
Technical SEO is cousin Teddy. The problem is, you have to build a birdhouse, so you’re gonna have to become friends with him. Birds = traffic.
Here’s technical SEO in a nutshell:
Improving your site speed, so it loads faster
Making your site mobile-friendly
Internally linking articles
Enhancing crawlability of your site
URL structure
See? I’ve lost you already. This is stuff we’re good at, but we also find boring as hell.
You can’t flip off cousin Teddy, because if you do, you’ll never learn how to build a birdhouse, and you’ll never attract birds.
Some aspects of technical SEO take care of themselves when you use website builders, but sometimes, that can actually make tech SEO a nightmare-and-a-half.
Don’t ignore it, embrace it, and yes, you can be upset about it. It’s a necessary evil.
#5 Ultra-Thin Content (for Her Pleasure)
This was supposed to be a short post, but just like in the bedroom, I’ve got too much stamina. It’s a curse, really.
If your content is too thin, it doesn’t satisfy the reader, and then they’ll leave and find another site. This tells search engines, “Hey, they didn’t find what they were looking for,” and your page isn’t as valuable.
But on the same note, you don’t want to bore people to tears, or spend time and money building content that people don’t actually read. So what do you do?
You build it anyway. On the whole, long-form content helps solve problems in a comprehensive way, and that doesn’t just do well for SEO: it builds trust in your audience.
Don’t opt for short-form site content unless it fully satisfies a query, or gives someone foundational knowledge they can confidently keep when they click away.
It’s time-consuming, it’s hard, but the best things usually are. (Yes, it’s another sex joke.)
Check out your competitors and see how in-depth their answers are, and see if you could cover it better.
So What’s the All-Around Fix for These Common SEO Mistakes?
Instead of spraying content on the internet and hoping it works, you need to sit down and make a plan. An actual, thought-out, unsexy-but-effective plan.
It’s easier said than done. Simply put, you need:
A deep competitor analysis
Intricate keyword research
An all-encompassing content marketing strategy
Direction for your email marketing campaign (SEO helps get signups)
Search engine optimization that targets the right audience
Social media that supports everything else we’ve talked about
A system to execute and iterate your marketing
A shit load of time to actually make it happen
Most HVAC business owners don’t have time. Hell, half of them are doing service calls instead of being in the office, running the show.
What makes you think you’re gonna have time to do your own SEO? It’s not something you can just bang out in a weekend and crack your knuckles at a job-well-done.
It takes continuous monitoring, analysis, time, and effort. You’re already in short supply of time, so what do you do?
Yeah, that’s right. You fuckin’ hire us. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
I’m gonna throw Josh’s Paradox at you. It’s called that because I want my name on something.
Josh’s Paradox dictates that if a business owner has the time to market their own business, they don’t have enough business, so then they get more business, their marketing suffers, and they have to run on this hamster wheel forever.
Why not step off the treads and get a Marketing Partner in cahoots with you? We actually give a shit about your growth and invest our time, effort, and emotion into your business. We’re not just your typical SEO guns for hire.