Best HVAC Companies in Dallas, TX

My name is Matthew Rupp, and my team and I have helped drive millions of dollars in new business to our HVAC clients that we love working with.

We are on a mission to work with just one HVAC company there in Dallas.

Let me guess a few things about you. If this doesn’t resonate with you, just stop reading here.

• You have absolutely ZERO desire to learn about “digital” marketing, citations, links, or any of that mumbo jumbo.
• You are SICK of being bombarded by people trying to sell you their “magic beans” when it comes to the web.
• You have likely tried a couple companies and “experts,” and they were a complete waste of time.
• You know being at the top of Google is important.

There’s another way.

Instead of trying to “sell” you on who we are and what we do, our team decided to just show you (and your competitors) who is doing well on Google and who is shooting themselves in the foot.

We identified all the ‘”players” in Dallas by strictly going off what we found on the first 2-3 pages Google. You will see that among those included, some are giant operations and some are very small.

We looked at over 200 metrics and assessed HVAC companies against each other using the following guidelines:

Before we get to the good stuff, let me explain one simple concept that will make understanding how to be #1 on Google much easier.
Dominating the first page of Google is about one word – “TRUST.”

“Trust” is the name of the game, and just like in real life, it must be EARNED. It’s not just passed out. We need to build trust in some areas, and often just as importantly, we need to get rid of things that are hurting that trust.

Why is trust so important?

If somebody searches for “my AC is blowing warm air,” do you think Google is going to trust the website that loads super slow, has cookie-cutter images, and doesn’t have content that actually addresses that problem?

Imagine if somebody searches for “my AC is frozen up” while in Dallas (which Google knows) and finds your site which has a page that specifically addresses this topic. You also have a rich, complete Google profile, recent positive reviews, recent photos, and you show a connection to the community (like a link to a local event). That’s a good bet you are trustworthy.

When I look at a website from Google’s perspective, I am looking for four questions to be answered:

1. WHO ARE YOU?
     People don’t buy credentials. They buy what you can do for them.

2. WHY SHOULD I CARE?
     Tell your visitors about you so that they know you are qualified for the job. Then, put the bulk of your efforts into showing people that your company is comprised of real human beings who care about them, their problems, and will help them find a solution.

3. CAN I TRUST YOU?
     Everyone is skeptical. Your visitors are thinking, “Yeah, right. Why should I believe any of this?” Do you answer that question? Without trust, your website is worthless.

4. WHAT’S NEXT?
     If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. An effective call to action on your site is something you can measure to see how hard your website is working for your business.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of building trust when it comes to your website. That’s essentially the whole point. Without trust, your potential customers won’t pick up the phone and call you.

Some of the best examples I came across are:

Spencer, Berkeys and Baker Brothers have a lot going for them:

• Photos of real people, a team of professionals you can trust
• Personalized trucks show that each is an established company  
• Trust signals showing how you’re highly rated  
• Call to Action signals – giving customers a good reason to click

Nothing is going to communicate trust like photos of actual technicians and members of your team.

Of course, any industry associations, safety, compliance, or service organizations that you can be a part of (cheaply) are worth their weight in gold when building trust, especially if they provide you with a badge to show off on your site! Testimonials and 5-star reviews are also great to feature.

Personally, I love seeing a local company giving back to their community. Showing you are invested in your community gives people a great reason to hire you. Spencer is one of the Dallas companies doing this well.

Among the worst scoring companies is Quality1. A big turn-off for potential customers is seeing the same cookie-cutter images of beautiful people on a site. Few things will turn visitors away from your site faster than stock photos.

The text at the top of your website is called the navigation. It shows visitors and Google where to go to find help. This part of your site must be useful and intuitive.

Unfortunately, many websites make it downright difficult for Google to understand what your business actually DOES. Remember, ranking well on Google is all about making it EASY for Google to see who you are, where you are, and why you deserve to be on top!

This navigation shown below could be for just about any business – window replacement, fencing, electrical. It lacks any mention of heating, cooling, or other specific HVAC services.

But what’s worse is a navigation that is hard to find. K&S is taking a risk that people won’t see or know to click on the little MENU option. This means visitors will miss out finding the specific HVAC information they are looking for.

Great rankings and traffic won’t grow your business alone. You need a website that communicates who you are, what you do, and why you are good at it. A good website builds trust and leads visitors to take action.

EXAMPLES OF OUR WORK

Here’s Hanna’s website before they became a client. They’ve been a Wichita leader in HVAC service for THREE generations, but you’d never know it by their website.

Now, here is Hanna’s website AFTER.

The reasons why you should have videos on your website are staggering:

• Selling is about storytelling, and videos are an excellent way to share a story.
• Videos keep visitors on your site longer, build trust, and increase the chances they reach out.
• Video is the most engaging medium. Our eyes are attracted to movement, so videos naturally draw attention (and keep it).
• Videos make it easier for visitors to know, like, and trust you.
• Videos can convey a great deal of information in a short amount of time.
• More video content is uploaded in 30 days than what the major TV networks created in 30 years!
• Having videos on your website can give you a big boost in organic (free) website traffic.
• Studies show that viewers retain 95% of a videos message compared to 10% when reading text.
• One third of all time spent online is watching videos.

Video is powerful, and it works!

Here is a look at how well each company does when it comes to video on their website. In the Dallas market, if you’re not one of the two companies that are knocking it out of the park, you are completely missing out.

Three companies receive the highest score possible for this category including Berkeys and Total Air. But it’s Baker Brothers who is the real super star here. They showcase THREE personable videos right on their homepage, each video really showing why they’re the company you can trust.

Each of these top 3 sites in this category have a superb video right on their homepage, which is exactly where it needs to be. The biggest mistake we see when it comes to videos is that they are not put on the homepage and are on pages that most people will never see. In fact, Airtron has a couple of very good videos, but they are deep inside their site on a page most people will never see.

Of the HVAC companies I looked at in Dallas, most did have videos somewhere on their websites. Because of that, companies need to be sure they have videos that really feature the company and give customers real reason to choose them. 

EXAMPLES OF OUR WORK

We create impactful videos for our clients that showcase expertise, community involvement, and other important areas that show customers this is a local company they can trust.

Making videos is time-consuming and a lot of work. Nope. Not true. They don’t have to be. In fact, we often create videos for our clients as a surprise. It took ZERO effort from them for us to make videos on such things as an amazing testimonial, telling their unique point of difference, or even turning an existing blog post into a video discussing their installation process.

I am sure you have heard the saying that people do business with people they know, like, and trust.

Here is a little-known fact you might find interesting: Without exception, the highest viewed page for EVERY client we have ever worked with (from pest control companies, dentists, plumbers, body shops to HVAC companies), is the ABOUT page. Hands down. Think about it – if somebody is coming into your home, working on your car, or fixing your teeth, you want them to be GOOD at what they do, have real experience in that field, give you a fair price, treat you right, and stand behind their work if something does go wrong. I am sure you would agree. What better way to see that than by photos of actual people and telling your story!

If I had just ONE piece of advice for any service business interested in seeing more results from their online presence, better rankings, and increased website traffic, it would be to TELL YOUR STORY.

• Who started the business?
• When did they start it?
• What was the motivation for getting into the industry?
• How has the business grown over the years?
• What sets you apart from the shop down the street?
• What kind of guarantee do you offer that builds trust?
• What associations or industry groups are you a part of?
• Are you or your business involved in the community?
• How long have some of your team been with you?

This is the “good stuff” – the personality, the culture, and the values you believe in and stand behind.

Which companies are doing well at telling their story for website visitors to see? It turns out only a handful are doing this well.

There are three clear winners here. One of the many right things they are doing is the ways they show trust. You get a great sense of their strong history of proven quality service in their About pages where you can learn about the company founder or president.

Total Air & Heat also does an amazing job proving they are the company the community has trusted for a very long time. Their story of their founder and history includes a great video telling that story.

One thing that was surprising to find is a big lack of BIO pages. Only one of the Dallas sites we researched, Spencer, includes such a page. Even that could be improved with names, job descriptions and some few details to help you know who these people are.

Airtron is at rock bottom here simply because their site includes no mention of people, founder, team, or history of the company.

The big problem with Levy & Son‘s website is that while it tells a story, it’s not their story. Their About page (as well as most/all of their other pages) are near an exact duplication of nearly 100 other HVAC companies across the company who are part of the Service Experts group. All branding, videos and photos are of “service expert” technicians, and not part of the local Levy & Sons team that will be coming to your Dallas home.

EXAMPLES OF OUR WORK

A picture is worth a thousand words. We are rock stars in this area.

What does the image below tell you?

• Company truck
• Company shirt
• Professional
• Not some guy on a cell phone

Images are powerful. If you have company trucks, or your techs wear company shirts, or you have awesome ladies running the office who really care and enjoy what they do – show them to the people.

Kansas Controls – a family-owned company with friendly faces to serve you

Content can be anything that helps your website visitors (or Google) see who you are, what you do, where you are, and why you deserve to be #1. It could be text, video, images, a guide, helpful resources, a checklist visitors can download, frequently asked questions, team bios, etc.

Most business owners don’t realize this, but Google doesn’t rank websites – it ranks PAGES!

I would like to challenge you. Think about your ideal customer and an HVAC-related issue they might have.

• air conditioning repair
• ac blowing hot air
• broken furnace
• clean dirty vents

Now look at your website. Can you see even ONE page that is at least halfway shows that’s what your company does? Don’t feel bad. The answer is almost always no. This gives you an idea of how LOW the bar is set (and great news for the one company we work with).

What do you think people search for more often? Is it “heating and air” or phrases like “ac unit not running” or “ac unit not turning on”?

That’s the road to riches when it comes to local SEO.

• Who is your customer?
• What is their pain point?
• How can you help them with that?

There isn’t a single heating and air website in Dallas that has as much rich and genuinely helpful content as is needed. By taking the time to do that well, you’re HANDING Google what it’s looking for.

About half of the companies we researched for this case study do provide a lot of good content across their website. Among those is Aire Texas, having services pages full of information, an FAQ page, and a regularly updated blog.

K & S also provides a lot of good information on its service page and a frequently updated blog. But another thing they are doing very well is having a service page for narrowly defined topics. Instead of one page on Air Quality services, they have 10! Although unfortunately they are at a disadvantage by putting these pages under the category of “Optimization”, which may get unnoticed by people who wouldn’t think to look there for air quality.

However, several sites have real problems with not having enough content. Airtron is at the bottom of the list because they simply don’t have enough pages. They don’t have many service pages (nor enough content on the ones they do have) and they also do not have a blog or any recent content.

Quality1 has similar problems. But while they have much more service pages, they are organized in a confusing manner and use terminology that just isn’t user friendly. Unless someone looking for an AC repair guy googles “residential hvac”, there’s not much chance for Quality1 to come up high in search results.

Recent content is important. Having your most recent blog be nearly a year old and about preparing for last winter will not help the people coming to your site in the middle of a hot Texas summer.

EXAMPLES OF OUR WORK

Here are just a few pieces of content that we regularly produce for our clients.

We did a lot of work for Cambridge Family Dentistry here in Wichita. When it came to producing content, my research showed a lot of people were searching for “pros and cons of dental implants.” So, we catered content to that.

The results speak for itself. We got Cambridge to show up not only as the top result, but the TOP THREE RESULTS!

Imagine if everyone in a wealthy part of town saw your company first when they were searching for a heating and air conditioning installation. That’s exactly what we aimed for with this content targeted for a specific location. 

Imagine if the people in your town who were wondering whether they should repair or replace their furnace saw your company pop up first with a way to find out.

Imagine if the people in your area who heard about this year’s R22 phase out did a Google search and immediately saw a local company with the information they need.

Reviews are invaluable for today’s service-oriented businesses, so it’s hard to overstate just how important this section is! Customers are becoming increasingly reliant upon reviews before making a buying decision.

Often when somebody visits a restaurant or local business, Facebook and Google know and ask these people to share how their experience was. This trend is only growing!

Reviews are a ranking factor to Google, which means they can impact the amount of traffic a website receives and, ultimately, how many phone calls you receive.

Reviews are incredibly important!

While there is one HVAC company having great success with reviews, the rest have a long way to go. But you don’t always have to be number 1. You just have to be better than most. Even improving to second place in this list is a real and easily attainable opportunity here for most Dallas companies.

Baker Brothers is exceeding here with over 4,600 reviews. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, they have received an average of 4.8 stars! 

What made Airtron the worst in the group was NOT for having the least amount of reviews. In fact, three other companies have less reviews than they do. But having an average score of only 4.0 stars can be a quick turn-off for a lot of potential customers.

Anything below 4.5 can start raising red flags for customers. A solid effort to get a lot more good reviews would go a long way in getting people who find you on Google actually picking up the phone to call you.

Google provides a free platform for you to tell them your address, industry, hours, fax, holiday hours, description, logo, tagline, and a wealth of other details. They will display all this right in the search results when somebody looks for your business. 

Just search for your business name and you will see the box on the right. Notice the number of reviews right out front which hopefully helps potential clients feel confident enough to reach out to your office.

This is one of the FIRST steps to take when trying to improve your rankings and website traffic. 

For your Google profile, you really want to give them a wealth of information, including:

• Industry
• Date business opened
• Holiday hours
• Photos and videos
• Products
• Opportunity to chat
• A way to book an appointment

Remember, all of this is meant to help Google see who you are, where you are, what you do, and why you are the best at it. Your profile is a golden opportunity to help Google see that without spending a penny!

This is where it gets interesting. As my team poured through each Google business profile, we couldn’t find an obvious winner. Just about each company is done SOME things right, but there are a lot of opportunities getting missed.

This is exciting but its an easy area to make BIG IMPROVEMENT on! It’s a tight competition and yet there isn’t much you really need to do to edge out the competition.

Photos of your team and your vehicles are a fabulous way to gain trust among Google searchers. And old photos further prove you are a company that has been around a long time and; therefore, can be trusted.

You also should be posting regularly onto Google. Several of you are doing this well, but no one as consistently as they should.

Only K & S is missing out completely on taking advantage of Google My Business to help get potential new customers to find them. They have no photos, no posts, no reasons why they’re the company you should call.

One thing that is a big turn-off (as mentioned before) is stock photos. This is your opportunity to show the real team and faces that make your LOCAL company great.

A citation is simply any mention of your business name, address, and phone number anywhere across the web (with or without a link back to your site). The most common sources of citations are the thousands of directories and social media sites like Facebook, TripAdvisor, HomeAdvisor, Angie List, Yelp, and YellowBook.   

Citations are important to your rankings, traffic, and ultimately how many phone calls you receive because Google is looking for CONSISTENCY among the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of references to your business. 

Does your company have a citation problem?

Well, answer these questions:

• Has your business ever changed location?
• Did another business previously occupy the building you’re in now?
• Has your phone number ever changed?
• Did you buy the business from someone else?
• Have you used tracking phone numbers at any point?

If you answered yes to any one of these questions, then yeah, you’ve probably got a mess to clean up.

We analyzed the total number of citations for each of the companies, how many of them have conflicting details, and how many are missing a presence on 85 of the most popular platforms.

Quality1 is obviously the strongest in the area. Just about all the other Dallas companies are dealing with a lot of errors and issues.

The two at rock bottom are having a lot of trouble with directory sites showing slightly different addresses than the one listed on their website. They are also missing from being listed on a lot of sites.

Taking a look at the citations for Frymire and Quigley, we find every instance has at least some issue with accuracy. With so much disparity among online directories, Google is having a hard time knowing which information to trust about this company.

An effective call to action is something you can measure to see how hard your website is working for your business.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Visitors to your website aren’t looking for a reason to STAY. They are looking for any excuse to LEAVE. They have a problem. They are looking for a solution, and if we have them on your site, and they have clicked on a page or two, it’s time to take them by the hand and tell them what to DO.

Is there anything they’re willing to do that’s easier than picking up the heavy phone to call you? In this texting age, I am amazed at how seldom I see chat boxes on service websites.

In an ideal situation, within a couple of SECONDS of visiting your website, people feel comfortable that your team is good at what they do and can help them solve their problem. From there, they are led to a clear, simple, direct CALL TO ACTION.  

Some of the ones that stood out on the HVAC websites in Dallas were:  

• So many coupons! There are at least 8 coupons for a variety of services on Frymire‘s homepage.
• The special $14.99 membership club available from Aire Texas.

• The chat boxes that catch your attention on several sites including Berkeys (although, if a customer is shopping around, they’ll see that “Zach” is also the “real” person you’ll chat with at Baker Brothers)

An effective call to action must be compelling, unique, and really stand out if you expect visitors to take action!

Just asking potential customers to “schedule a service” or “learn more” only turns them away.

WE LOVE CHAT

Having a chat box makes so much sense. Who doesn’t text nowadays? It’s not as “scary” as calling somebody who could be a pushy salesperson. Visitors don’t find text boxes threatening – they are in control. Sure, they may have called you anyway, but they may have just as easily moved on to another site that does have a chat-box.

I can speak from experience. This is the one on my site:

Just today, I received a chat on my phone from my website.

Unfortunately, “optimize” has been used as a bit of a code word for “take client’s money and do nothing.” 

If you recall, Google ranks pages, not websites.  So, what does that mean for optimization?

Let’s take this scenario as an example: You have a page on your website that targets “AC repair.” You add a couple subheadings, some useful text, maybe a short video about the importance of turning on your AC before the hot days of summer hit to make sure it’s working, or possibly a customer testimonial raving about how great of a job your team did at fixing their AC. All those items help to “optimize” that page for ranking for search terms related to “ac repair.”  

Several HVAC companies in Dallas are having some problems keeping their site’s pages from being well optimized. A few are having entirely way too many problems here, with K & S being the worst of the bunch.

Google ranks by looking at individual PAGES and not sites. And when it comes to optimization, there are some specific things they look for, including:

• How many words
• How many times you used the keywords people are searching for
• Photos that are about those keywords AND have embedded info (Alt Tags) with those keywords
• Headlines that use those important keywords
• That it’s written conversationally
• That it uses other related keywords

An example of decent optimization is on the Air Conditioning Repair page for Aire Texas. We use a great program to see a page exactly how Google sees it.

Their AC page received a modest score of 6.9. Adding more content specific to air conditioning repair, such as some FAQs, along with some photos would really enhance this page’s optimization.

Now let’s compare this to another HVAC company’s page for air conditioning repair.  Quigley‘s big mistake is that they don’t have a page dedicated to AC repair. Instead, this page on all their air conditioning services is failing to do what it needs to do to receive high rankings on Google for searchers with broken air conditioners.

Their poor score of 3.8 reflects that this page is trying to do too much, trying to hit on too many different services, but also still lacking important words and phrases people are googling. Having a separate page just for AC installation and another just for AC maintenance would solve this problem.

So what made the worst company in our graph the worst?

Proper keywords and well-written content are just some of the factors that contribute to how well a page is optimized. There are also many “hidden” factors that can really cause problems. K & S scored the worst among these 15 companies, but they actually are doing quite well with using important keywords and having good content.

What rates them so poorly is having more than 11,000 empty alt tags. That means someone knew to add a whole bunch of photos to their site, they just didn’t know to add alt tags to them. They also have a problem with missing meta data, as does Quigley, Baker Brothers and Berkeys.

EXAMPLES OF OUR WORK

The best way for us to show you how we can fix pages on your site is to do just that. So, if you email me a link to one page of your site, I will get back to you with at least 20 fixes to make your page optimized for the actual keywords people in Dallas are searching for.

Have you ever done a furnace or AC job to fix what some other HVAC company or guy in town really messed up? Yeah, I know that feeling. Some of my clients came to me, often reluctantly, after spending a lot of money on SEO that never did anything.

Here’s the thing. If someone is properly optimizing your site, you’re going to see it. I know of many business owners who pay SEO companies THOUSANDS of dollars every month to optimize their site, and yet they don’t know what the SEO company is actually doing.

Real, effective SEO is something you can see. So, email me one of your web pages and let me show you what we can do. No cost. No obligation.

The technical “behind the scenes” aspects of SEO are critical. I get it. A lot of this sounds like a foreign language. I don’t expect my clients to know (any of) this. That’s what my team and I are here for.

The bottom line is that Google needs to be able to crawl (read) your site, be able to tell what the images are of, and hopefully find what’s called a sitemap which gives the search engines essentially a roadmap to your site. Your images should be sized properly, in the right format, and so on.

These are just a handful of the technical factors that are important, sometimes vital.

How do the HVAC companies in Dallas compare when it comes to technical factors? Keep in mind, this is another chart where you want to be at the bottom.

This case study wouldn’t be complete without including a “technical” section, but don’t worry. We kept this super easy to understand.

We ran each of the companies’ websites through a powerful tool that looks at dozens of important metrics.

We added up all the technical issues and ranked each company according to the TOTAL number of issues.

This is a VERY simplistic way to show this. In truth, some of these issues can be quite involved. Some issues are more minor and create fewer problems for your website.

At the opening of this case study we talked about the importance of making it easy for Google to trust you are who you say, do what you say, and are good at it.

This is why it’s so important to look at the entire picture. Quigley is by far having the most technical problems with more than 24,000 link errors.

Why is site speed so important?

This one is a no brainer. We have all visited a website and had it load sooooo slowly. I am sure you can attest to how quickly you move on when you run into a website like this.

This is definitely one of the EASIEST wins for our clients. It’s amazing what improving a website’s speed can do for its rankings, the amount of traffic, how long visitors stay, or how many pages they look at.

How the HVAC companies there in Dallas compare when it comes to site speed.

Spencer is leading the pack with a near perfect site speed on desktop computers (94) and an excellent speed on mobile devices (94). With a majority of your customers finding you on their smart phone, having a fast mobile loading speed is vital.

While several companies are having real problems with overall speed, Airtron really needs to address it. They have a desktop speed of 32, and a mobile speed of only 12.

How many potential customers are they losing simply because they got tired of waiting for the website to load?

A backlink is anything you can click on website A that takes you to website B. It might be an image, a line of text, a video, or anything really. If you can click on it and be taken from that site to yours, you have a link from that site – a backlink. 

To Google, links are basically votes of confidence. 

The more backlinks you have from websites that are either 

• AUTHORITATIVE – High quality. The local newspaper, Chamber of Commerce, Red Cross, or Make a Wish Foundation  
• LOCAL – Show a connection to a cause or something going on in the community  
• RELATED – Industry associations, HVAC forums, blog comments on industry articles, or white papers  

…the more trust your website will have. The key is QUALITY backlinks not QUANTITY!  

A handful of backlinks from local companies in Dallas or related to the HVAC industry are 100x more impactful than a random link from some gardening website in Philadelphia or a company that sells racing products in Atlanta.

Websites are given an “authority score.” An authority score is a guide to seeing how strong, related or reputable the links pointing to your site are.

Berkeys is coming out on top with having an enormous number of backlinks that have high authority scores.

Like it or not, the world of marketing has changed dramatically and it’s only accelerating. We all know that the days of being able to write a check for radio, TV commercials, and Yellow Page ads and having the phone ring and ring have long since passed us by. 

I know that’s true because I was once in your shoes.

I spent 20 years running a service business and that’s what I was doing in 2010-11 when I first heard the word ‘Google’. (I still remember thinking “what the hell’s that?”) I threw away thousands of dollars trying to get my website on the top of Google and I might as well have planted it in my yard and expected a money tree to grow for all the good it did me.

Long story short – I got frustrated. I decided to figure it out on my own, which I did. That led to helping a friend, then another, and before I knew it, this was a full-time gig. Today I have a whole team of smart folks, and we specialize in helping HVAC and plumbing contractors make the phone ring.

The problem is the world was changing so fast (and still is) that it was hard for most of them to stay on top of what IS working vs. what WAS working. Then you have the fact that a lot of those so-called “experts” were full of shit to begin with (okay FINE, a lot of them were just interested in getting your money).

You are in a service industry that, to a large degree, has been relationship-based, but as technology keeps racing along – and as the kids of parents that have been loyal customers for years and years move into the decision-maker’s seat – having a strong online presence is only going to be increasingly important. 

I get it. You couldn’t care less about links, citations, useful content, or any of this (none of our clients do). You want the phone to RING. You know the web is important, and you need somebody smart, that you trust, to help carry the ball and make things happen. 

That’s what we do. 

We don’t do cookie-cutter solutions or surface work. We dig deep and make things happen for our clients.

My agency doesn’t work with just anyone. We are actually quite selective. We never work with more than twelve clients at a time, and never with more than one company in the same industry at a time. If you are interested in being the one Dallas HVAC company that I put all my knowledge, time, and energy (and that of my team) into being #1 on Google, you can learn what to expect working with us here.

If you would like to have a chat and see if we are a good fit, you can reach me at 316-312-8181 or email me. 

Have a fantastic day! 

Matthew