HVAC

The first cold night is here. Does AI know my company repairs furnaces, or only air conditioners?

A company that has spent years being found for air conditioning can be nearly unreadable for heat. During a cold snap you have no time to rebuild anything, so this page covers a five minute test and two sentences.

A cold night: a two-story house in section, its furnace opened up with no flame at the burners, the rooms frosted and a small space heater doing the furnace's job, and at the curb an HVAC van whose big badge has a snowflake for cooling and only an empty outline where the flame for heating should be

Often it does not, and the reason is ordinary. In a warm market the name on the truck says air conditioning, the logo is a snowflake, the photos show condensers, and nearly every review talks about July. All of that is true. It also means that when a homeowner wakes up to a cold house and asks who can fix a furnace this morning, there is little on the page that lets an assistant say your name with confidence.

A five minute test for heat

Search your own homepage for four words: furnace, heater, heating, heat pump. Count the times each appears in text you can select with a cursor. Words inside a photo, a logo or a banner image do not count, because a system reading the page may never see them.

Then open your Google Business Profile and read the categories and the services list. Google explains that relevance, one of the three things it weighs for local results, is "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for", and it asks for complete and detailed business information to help with that match. A profile that describes only cooling is a complete description of half your company.

Last, ask an assistant, by your company name, whether you repair furnaces. If the answer is hedged, you have found the problem while there is still winter left.

Two sentences to add tonight

The first says what heating work you do. Name the equipment in the words a homeowner uses: gas furnace repair, heat pump repair, wall and floor heaters if you work on them, thermostats. Put it in the top part of the homepage, in text. If your site carries structured data, the HVACBusiness type has room to describe what you offer, but the sentence a person can read comes first.

The second says where an urgent safety call goes. The Environmental Protection Agency lists furnaces among the household sources of carbon monoxide, including leaking chimneys and furnaces and back-drafting from furnaces. Some of the people reaching your site on a cold night are not asking about comfort. Tell them, next to your phone number, what to do when an alarm is sounding or there is a smell of gas, before they read anything about booking a repair. Write the instruction your company actually gives on the phone.

What a cold snap will not let you fix

A cold snap in a mild climate is short. By the time a new furnace page has been written, checked and found, the weather has usually turned. So do not write one this week. Reviews are the same: the heating reviews that would help you today had to be earned on last autumn's tune-ups. Note both gaps and move on to the calls in front of you.

What you can still do is keep the record straight while you work. If the queue is two days long, say so in a dated line on the homepage. If you are seeing existing customers first, say that too.

Run the check before the weather turns back

The free check on the HVAC guide reads your site as an AI system would and reports what it can and cannot read there. Run it this week, while heating is on your mind, and look at one thing in the result: whether heat shows up at all. It takes about a minute to start. The fuller job, deciding what your heating pages should say and getting them in place while it is still warm, is laid out in what to publish about heating before winter.

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

Our name has Air Conditioning in it. Does that stop AI from recommending us for furnace repair?

A name alone does not decide it, but it sets a first impression that the rest of your site and profile then have to correct. If the words furnace, heater and heat pump appear in readable text on your homepage and your profile lists heating among what you do, an assistant has what it needs to say you repair heat.

What should my website say about a gas smell or a carbon monoxide alarm?

Say where that call should go first and say it plainly, near your phone number. A homeowner in that situation should not be left reading a booking form, and an assistant quoting your page should be quoting a clear instruction.