HVAC

How does AI know which cities my HVAC company serves if I have no storefront?

Your trucks leave a yard every morning and drive to people's homes. Nobody visits the yard. So the question an assistant has to answer, whether you work in the homeowner's town, has no address to lean on.

A pictorial road map: the HVAC company's service van in front with no storefront, roads running out to the nearby towns it serves, a river behind them whose only bridge is washed out, and a dashed ring that claims the towns on the far side too

It knows what you publish, in the places it reads, and it trusts that most when every place says the same thing. For a heating and air company with no showroom, that means three sources carry the whole answer: the service areas on your Google Business Profile, the list of towns on your website, and the areas your directory and manufacturer listings imply. The work is making those three one list.

What Google asks of a company like yours

Google calls you a service-area business. Its Business Profile guidelines say that if customers are not served at your address, you "should hide your business address from customers", keep one profile for the central office with a designated service area, and keep the overall area within "about 2 hours of driving time" from where you are based. Its help page on managing a service area allows up to 20 areas, set by city, ZIP code or another named area. There is no radius option.

Twenty is the constraint that forces a decision. A company that lists every city in the county because it once drove to each of them runs out quickly, and that is useful: it makes you pick the towns you actually want calls from.

Distance works differently for you

Google's page on local ranking names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence, with distance meaning "how far each business is from the customer who's searching". A storefront has a point on the map to measure from. Google does not publish how it measures distance for a business whose address is hidden, and listing a town does not promise you will appear there, so a heating and air company that adds a town forty minutes away is making a claim about its work, not buying a position. Being honest about your area costs you nothing here; overstating it mostly produces calls you have to turn down.

Why forty city pages usually hurt

The standard advice for years was a page per city: "AC Repair in Town A", "AC Repair in Town B", each the same three paragraphs with the name swapped. Google's spam policies describe exactly that under doorway abuse, giving the example of "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page". An assistant reading those pages learns nothing it could not learn from one list, and it learns that your site repeats itself.

A town page earns its place when it carries something true about that town: the housing stock you work on there (older homes with floor furnaces, new tracts with attic air handlers), the utility or local rebate that applies, the permit office your crew deals with, the jobs you have done nearby with photos. If you cannot write that for a town, list the town on your main service area page and stop.

Say the thing only HVAC has: two radiuses

A plumber's service area is usually one line. Yours often is not. A maintenance visit booked for next Tuesday can go farther than a no-cooling call at nine at night, and an install crew may cover more ground than the on-call technician. Write that down:

Scheduled work: the full list of towns for installs, replacements and maintenance.
After-hours calls: the smaller list your on-call technician covers, if it is smaller.
Commercial work: if you do rooftop units for businesses, where, since the answer is often different again.

In structured data, the areaServed property takes the same list. Keep it identical to the visible text.

Where the list also has to match

Check the service areas on Yelp, the BBB, Nextdoor, your manufacturer dealer locator and any lead service you pay for. Each of these may show your old shop address or a radius from it, and each is one more description of where you work. The one on the website is the one you write in full sentences, so make it the master and bring the others into line with it.

Service area is one of several facts an assistant tries to confirm about a heating and air company. The others are on the HVAC guide.

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

How many service areas can an HVAC company set on Google?

Google's help page on managing a service area says a Business Profile can have up to 20 service areas, set by city, postal code or another type of area rather than by a radius. The profile's guidelines add that the overall service area should not extend farther than about two hours of driving time from where the business is based.

Should my HVAC company build a page for every city we serve?

Only where you have something true and specific to say about that city. Google's spam policies name having multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page as an example of doorway abuse. A single, accurate list of towns is better than a set of city pages that differ only in the name.