HVAC contractors enjoy high demand from the consumer market. There are plenty of users who own HVAC – a term that means “Hating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning” – devices. These appliances require periodic maintenance to keep them in top condition. Cleaning these machines should only be done by people who have the necessary training. Thus, expert HVAC cleaners are always in demand.
The competitive nature of the market requires an investment on knowing how to get HVAC customers through marketing. Being able to advertise yourself to your target audience is the only way you can get customers for your HVAC cleaning company. However, digital marketing for HVAC companies must be done right if you want to reap the full benefits of this service.
The first step to knowing that what you’re doing is right is to know what components make up the perfect digital marketing for HVAC companies. These are, namely: keyword research, technical SEO analysis, on-page optimization, content development, link building, online directories and Google My Business.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the heart of search engine optimization. Ranking for search engine results pages means optimizing your site’s content to keywords that are relevant to the HVAC industry. Those keywords may relate to questions your customers ask or look for on search engines. Optimizing for these terms means that your website will appear whenever somebody makes the queries online.
Keyword research is a slightly technical process. You and your search engine HVAC marketing specialist must first come up with a list of keywords that you want to target. Once the list is ready, the next step is to run the keywords through some tools to find more relevant keywords and to determine factors like ranking difficulty, monthly search volume, and competitor activity.
Competitor research is also an important part of this process. If you know what keywords your competitors are ranking for, you could also try to take a piece out of that pie for your HVAC cleaning company.
Hijacking your competitor’s keyword performance also helps you save time and effort in link building. You already know which keywords your market uses to find your competitors. All you have to do is get yourself ranked alongside other HVAC cleaning companies on the search engines and attract your potential customers’ attention.
Technical SEO Analysis
Also called an SEO audit, a technical SEO analysis is a study of your entire website to determine if there are issues affecting your ranking in search engines. More often than not, a website receives a penalty from Google or does not get in to the top ranking results because of technical issues.
One red flag that SEO experts look for during an SEO audit is a broken page, or a set of broken pages. These are technically referred to as “404 errors.” This error simply means links that lead to a non-existing page. In some cases, these pages may have been renamed or assigned new permalinks. Whatever the reason for the change, the outcome is the same – Google’s spiders will be unable to locate the old pages.
If your website had links pointing to the old page, it will redirect to a 404 page. This can result in a negative experience for a user. Experience happens to be one of the factors in Google’s ranking algorithm.
For instance, a user who lands on a 404 page will click on the Back button within the next five to ten seconds. In SEO terms, this event is called a “bounce.” Google’s algorithm considers the number of bounces on any website’s pages in deciding whether or not the content on the Page is spam.
What is a Bounce?
Theoretically, a bounce signals to Google think that the content on the page is irrelevant or uninteresting. Hence, they leave the Page to look for more information somewhere else. This is how Google identifies websites that abuse keywords. Once these websites are pinpointed, Google’s next action is to penalize them by removing them from its index.
You want to avoid that since getting de-indexed means you’ll have no chance at appearing in the SERPs at all. Fortunately, a technical audit will reveal broken pages and other rank-affecting problems in your website. The audit is the first step to rectifying these errors so you have a shot at improving your SERP rankings.
Other areas a technical SEO analysis looks at is your on-page content and how it is optimized. Does each page contain a mention of a keyword that you’re targeting? Are the images’ Alt Text optimized to your keywords as well? Do your meta descriptions contain the right key phrases?
These metadata are very important, but are generally taken for granted. Aside from aiding in your rankings, the meta description provides users a snapshot of what your content is about in the SERPs. The alt text helps any image to appear in the image results. Image results contain a Visit Page button that can lead traffic to your content.
On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization is the implementation of what you have learned from both keyword research and technical SEO analysis. This mainly involves updating all the existing pages of your website and making sure that they mention a main keyword and a set of relevant keywords.
Before Google’s algorithm updates, optimization involved setting a keyword density for each page content. Writers would repeatedly mention the keyword for a certain number of times. While this technique worked, Google soon became swamped with websites whose content are not relevant to the keywords and were useless to the end users’ queries.
In response, Google tweaked its algorithm starting in 2013 to weed out the “junk” websites that abused keyword density. It also changed how it ranks websites based on the content on the pages that its robots crawled. On-page keyword density is no longer a huge factor. Any websites that try to abuse it either receive a penalty or are totally blacklisted from indexing.
How Google’s algorithm looks at keyword optimization after the updates is not clear. However, experts in SEO believe that it uses Semantics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to determine content relevance. Semantics looks at synonyms and related keywords in the content. On the other hand, NLP is a form of artificial intelligence that helps computers and robots understand human languages better.
In other words, Google’s indexing program looks for the presence of semantically related keywords in your content aside from your primary keyword. NLP analyzes the content to make sure you incorporate the keywords in a manner that’s relevant to the content and not just placed within the body text for ranking purposes.
Content Development
Content is and has always been central to search engine optimization and digital marketing for HVAC companies. Google puts a huge premium on fresh and relevant content during ranking. This means that you’d have to introduce a means of uploading fresh content to your website regularly. The only way to do that is to establish a blog.
Having a blog opens up a window to numerous opportunities. Aside from keeping your content fresh and updated, you can also use a blog to establish your business as an authority in your niche. Consumers are more likely to give their trust to a company that is an acknowledged expert in their industry. Writing informative articles regularly on your company’s blog is a very effective way of demonstrating expertise and building trust.
Keyword optimization is also a critical part in blogging. Google needs to see a main keyword and a set of related search terms within your content. The search engine’s algorithms have also recently implemented natural language processing. NLP will allow Google to process semantics in indexing and ranking, so knowing what your keywords’ synonyms and antonyms are could be a big help to your content development.
Finally, you must implement advance content planning. You’ll need to sit down with your content development team and draft a content schedule. Advance planning allows you to work on more articles ahead of time. This in turn helps you keep up with your content calendar. All your team has to do is upload the finished content and schedule their publication.
Link Building
Content development and optimization comprise only one side of digital marketing for HVAC companies. The other side is link building. Your website needs to accrue high quality links from reputable websites in and out of your niche. In Google’s eyes, these links count as votes towards your authority and trustworthiness. Websites with fresh and relevant content and votes of confidence from other experts receive a high score in the search engine’s algorithm.
Guest blogging is the most effective method of link building available. In this method, your outreach specialists contact website administrators and offer to develop content for them. Admins will then upload this content on their website. For their part, they will allow a do-follow link on your article pointing back to your website. In most cases, the arrangement is for free. However, some website owners may charge a fee.
Quality is a must when building links in digital marketing for HVAC companies. You must not allow your website to build backlinks from disreputable websites. Their negative ranking will bleed back to your website. You might suffer penalties as a result. That means death for your business, which is something you don’t want.
Fortunately, there are tools that you can use to analyze your backlink profile. You should make use of these tools periodically. Some websites that are clearly spam might link back to your website for various reasons. You would want to know when that happens so you can proactively prevent any adverse effects on your ranking.
You should also avoid building links coming from websites that are irrelevant to your niche. Your website faces no danger of being marked as spam. However, you can get more “link juice” from sites in the same industry as yours.
Online Directories
You might think that the days of directories are over because we have the Internet. Their paper counterparts may not be that widely used anymore, but they have digital variants now. Just like the traditional directory, their purpose is to collate information on local businesses that their visitors can easily access.
Online directories may not be vital to search engine optimization. However, they are vital to ensuring that your potential customers know where to find information about you. These websites are automatically authorities in Google’s eyes. If your target market does a search for HVAC companies in your area, these directories will be the first they’ll see.
Aside from listing yourself to as many of these directories as possible, you should also check for the accuracy of the information. If there are updates to your contact information, make sure you update your listings accordingly. You don’t want to lose potential business over a wrong phone number or email address.
Google My Business
Last but not least, you will want to register your HVAC cleaning company in Google My Business. Having a listing makes your business eligible to appear in Google Local Packs. Google Local Packs are search engine results that include Google Map information and the contact information in the listing. They occupy the topmost portion of SERPs when people search for businesses in their local area.
Companies that registered with Google My Business enjoy unparalleled visibility. Google remains the largest search engine service in the world. Statistics indicate that Google receives 5.6 billion searches in one day. Appearing in those Google Local Packs gives your business considerable exposure, and increases your chances of closing sales.
Another advantage of registering to GMB is the access to tools. One of the tools that GMB provides is Insights. This tool gives you information on how many times you appeared in searches and what queries people used. You can also learn about user behavior on your website and demographics, among others.
In other words, these tools help you understand how good your website is performing in the SERPs. They let you know what additional keywords to target. You can also see which of your websites are receiving significant amounts of traffic. This could call for another technical audit to eliminate any ranking-related issues.
Key Takeaway
Digital marketing for HVAC companies is an indispensable asset for cleaning contractors like you. People rely on the Internet for almost all of their information needs. You will need to be highly visible online if you want your clientele to find you. The above marketing techniques have proven themselves effective in advertising businesses like yours through the Internet. Thus, digital marketing is a worthy investment you should make as an entrepreneur.
