A lot has changed with marketing for HVAC companies in the last five years. In 2018 it’s no longer good enough to say that your HVAC company does marketing online. Something as fundamental as a website is no longer going to cut it. There are 1,000 other points of entry and places that people find you online beyond sites that you need to be concerning yourself with.
Just Having a Website is Not Enough
The website is still important. The site still needs to be a center point and a landing page for all of your various sources, but by itself, it will do absolutely nothing for you. For instance, let’s say you live in Seattle and you want to rank a website for HVAC in that area. So you excitedly put together a site “Seattle Heating” or whatever your business is called, and you build it, and it goes onto the internet. You may or may not be surprised to learn that that website is now sitting in absolute oblivion on the internet. Google may have recognized that the site pertains to Seattle, and it may have understood that it relates to HVAC and the heating and cooling industry, but it’s giving you a very low ranking because one, your website is very new. It will prioritize sites that are older than yours. And it will prioritize sites for many, many various reasons, including the quality of your content and how much content that you have, it ensures that your content is not duplicated from anywhere else. And then even if you get all of that perfect, it then starts to rely on sources outside of your website to see if your site is an important website.
One of the primary ways it does this is by looking at what other websites that Google trusts are pointing at your site and saying that is a valid and vital website. If it starts to check those boxes, Google will reward you by increasing your ranking score. It’s not an actual term but essentially what that means is how close you are to the number one spot when somebody types in, let’s say, “Seattle Furnace” or “Seattle Air Conditioning.” Having a higher ranking spot is extremely important when it comes to on-demand type business like locksmiths, HVAC companies, et cetera. If you think from a customer’s perspective, they were sitting there, and everything was working fine. Then one day their system broke down, and they found out that they need to get a new air conditioner or they decided to get a new air conditioner, they then in 2018, often will go to Google and type in “new air conditioner.”
Focus On What You Do Best and Let Professionals Do Your Marketing
Google will then geo-locate them in the Seattle area and serve up the results that it finds to be the most pertinent. Of course, giving priority to its own advertisements. All of this is done in the world of the search engine optimization company. All of this is extremely time-consuming. Generally, if you’re an HVAC company, you want to be putting your time and effort towards doing HVAC and let professionals deal with the things that you don’t want to deal with. With my own business, I don’t like to deal with accounting, so I hire an accountant, I’m not going to do my own legal work, so I hire lawyers, and for steadily climbing rankings in various communities I hire search engine optimization people. For us, we chose Coronation Internet Marketing after an extensive search of multiple companies.
Work With Your SEO and Digital Marketing Company
Just because you hire a company does not mean that your job is over. A good internet marketing company or a good search engine optimization company will have expectations for you and tell you what they need from you to keep moving the ball forward. For instance, you should create content consistently. Maybe even once per week put out some information about your industry or market specifically. Your SEO person should be able to take that information to convert it into pages and other media on your website to help improve your website’s rankings.
Start Doing Video Marketing
Digital marketing and search engine optimization are more of a foundation to what you need to do online. But there are many, many more layers and levels of what you need to be doing. For instance, to be successful in 2018 and moving forward, you need to, in every way you possibly can, push yourself out there into the world and get yourself in front of the camera, in front of all of your potential customers to let them get to know you. If you are a good honest person, people will be able to see that through the camera. They’ll be able to judge you for themselves and decide if this is somebody that I want to do business with.
At a gut level, if people decide this is somebody I trust, and this is somebody I want to do business with, they will choose your company. What 99% of your competitors are going to be doing and maybe you’re doing this yourself, is not doing the hard part of pushing themselves out there and hiding behind graphics, fancy lettering, and pretty pages. At the end of the day, customers are ultimately buying you and the more you can push yourself out there as a representative for your company, the more you’re going to be able to convert these people into paying customers.
Be Social
That being said, not only should you have yourself on your webpage in photos and videos, the start to push into the world of social media. Social media is not a simple task. Social media is not a short-term endeavor. However, done right, social media is a lethal weapon. If you are comfortable getting in front of the camera, even if you’re not comfortable getting in front of the camera, the important part of it is people can see you and judge you for themselves. When you first start social media your challenge is going to be forcing yourself not to be advertising to customers. You really want to give them some information, but you want to connect with them.
Let your clients and potential clients get to know you. Invite them into your world, into your life. People see enough advertisements every day to last a lifetime. What people do have an endless thirst for is connecting with new people and learning about them. Be that person, and you will change the game in your market.
Steve Gadsby is an HVAC entrepreneur and owner of Furnace USA. Steve hosts the FUSA Nation podcast, a show for and about home service professionals where he talks with other professionals and marketers.
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