What Your Heating Pages Should Say Before Winter

They should say, in a homeowner's words, which heating equipment you repair, what its failures look like, what a safety call involves, and when you come out. Cooling pages do not cover this by implication. A system reading your site treats "we fix air conditioners" and "we fix furnaces" as two separate facts, and it needs to find each one written down.

Heat is asked about in other words

Nobody with a cold house searches for HVAC. They describe what they see: the furnace is blowing cold air, the heater will not turn on, the pilot went out, the heat pump is running and the house is not getting warmer, there is a burning smell the first time the heat comes on. Write those phrases down as you hear them on the phone this autumn, then check whether any of them appears on your site. For most companies in warm markets the count is close to zero, because the site was written in summer about summer.

An inventory, one row per kind of equipment

List the heating equipment you actually service and give each its own section or page. A typical list:

Gas furnaces. Ignition and flame problems, blower problems, short cycling, age and replacement.
Heat pumps in heating mode. How they differ from a furnace, what frost on the outdoor unit means, when backup heat runs.
Wall heaters, floor furnaces and other older equipment, if you work on them. Say so plainly, and say if you do not.
Thermostats and controls. Often the whole problem, and the easiest page to write well.

A row you leave out is not neutral. If you no longer service floor furnaces and the site is silent, an assistant asked about floor furnace repair in your town has nothing from you to rule you in or out.

The safety paragraph is not optional

Heating carries a risk cooling does not. The Environmental Protection Agency's page on carbon monoxide and indoor air names leaking chimneys and furnaces and back-drafting from furnaces among its sources, and recommends having "a trained professional inspect, clean and tune-up central heating system (furnaces, flues and chimneys) annually". That sentence is a reason for your tune-up to exist, from a source a reader will trust more than a contractor's brochure. Cite it. Then state what your own inspection covers and what you do when you find a cracked heat exchanger or a blocked flue. Keep it factual. Fear sells badly in a summary and worse in a review.

Build the tune-up page from a public checklist

ENERGY STAR's maintenance checklist has a heating section: check gas or oil connections, gas pressure, burner combustion and the heat exchanger. It also says the heating system is best checked in the fall, because contractors are busy once winter comes. Use its items as the skeleton of your heating tune-up page and say which ones your visit includes. The companion page on describing a maintenance plan covers pricing and renewal terms, so they are not repeated here.

Tell the profile you do heat

Your Business Profile has categories and a list of services, and Google's guidelines ask you to choose "the fewest number of categories it takes to describe your overall core business". For a company that heats and cools, the core is both, and a cooling category alone leaves half of it out. Read your services list in October and add the heating lines that are missing. Do the same on your manufacturer's dealer page if it lets you list product lines.

Heat pumps deserve one extra look, because incentive language around them changes. The page on the federal heat pump credit explains what can and cannot be said this year.

Ask for the review while the furnace is the subject

Most of your reviews were written in summer and say so. Autumn tune-ups are the natural time to earn a few that mention heat, since the customer has just watched a technician open the furnace. A handful of recent reviews that name furnace or heater work changes what a summary of your company can honestly say.

When to stop writing

Finish before the first cold night, not after it. Once the phones start, the plan shrinks to the short list on what to check during a cold snap. Until then, run the free check on the HVAC guide and see whether heating appears in what your site makes readable. None of this decides which company an assistant names; it decides whether yours can be described accurately when the question is about heat.

Not legal or tax advice. This describes how AI systems can read a heating and air company in public; licensing, permit, refrigerant, pricing and incentive rules are set by federal, state and local agencies, and they change.

Questions

Should heating and air conditioning share one page?

They can share a company, a license and a phone number, but they should not share a page. A homeowner with no heat asks a different question in different words, and a page that answers both ends up specific about neither.

We are in a warm climate. Is heating worth separate pages?

That is a business decision, and the honest test is whether you want the calls. If you do, the heating season is short and arrives all at once, so the pages have to be in place before it starts.

What should my heating pages say before winter so AI can answer a no-heat question?