Best HVAC companies in Albuquerque, NM

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 Albuquerque.

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 Albuquerque 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 Albuquerque (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:

TLC, Anderson and Daniels 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!

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. Anderson is doing this well and, therefore, standing out from most of the competition.

Two of the worst scoring companies are Duke City and MCS. 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 could be for just about any business, as it lacks any mention of heating, cooling, or other specific HVAC services.

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 Albuquerque market, you are either among the few who are knocking it out of the park or are completely missing out.

Four companies receive the highest score possible for this category including TLC and Daniels. But it’s Anderson and Wagner who are the real super stars here. Both showcase the most personable videos about their company, each really showing why they’re the company you can trust.

Each of these top 4 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. 

Of the 14 HVAC companies I looked at in Albuquerque, we couldn’t locate videos anywhere on half of the sites. Signature had one on their Air Conditioning Installation page, but it was a video from Lennox, not about their local company. 

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.

TLC and Anderson are the 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.

Sunshine also does an amazing job proving they are the company the community has trusted for a very long time. They have this great message telling the story of their company.

There was a big absence among nearly every HVAC company in showing team bios. Despite missing a team page, Wagner does a nice job featuring staff in a very positive way.

When “telling your story,” something I see all the time are companies making it HARD to find the “good stuff” on their website!
Take a look at the below website navigation that includes a drop down menu.

The “About Us” isn’t just something to hover over to reveal 3 pages in that category, it is ALSO a page that you can click on to visit, which I’m sure a lot of visitors don’t realize. This situation makes it really easy to miss what could be the BEST page on an entire website! We see this ALL the time.

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 Albuquerque 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 14 companies we researched for this case study do provide a lot of good content across their website. Among those is TLC, having services pages full of information as well as a regularly updated blog.

B Carlson also provides a lot of good information, including helpful FAQs on service pages.

However, several sites have real problems with not having enough content. As seen across Sunshine’s pages, just a couple paragraphs on a page is not enough to make them high-ranking on Google.

And while Bosque does have a blog section, having only 2 articles is woefully inadequate.

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 are a couple of HVAC companies in Albuquerque really hitting it out of the ballpark, a couple are falling way behind, and there’s an amazing opportunity here for them.

Wagner is exceeding here with almost 1,600 reviews. Among these 14 companies, they have 5 times the number of reviews than most others. The next closest is TLC with about 1,150 reviews.

What made Sunshine the worst in the group was NOT having the least amount of reviews. Although they have some of the fewest among these 14 companies, their average rating of 3.9 stars is what is really hurting them. Duke City has the fewest with 55 reviews, but having an average rating of 4.8 is enough to convince people that they are a company that does good work.

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!

It was reassuring to see that a lot of you in Albuquerque are doing many things right when it comes to your Google My Business profile. Only a few are missing out on this great opportunity. Unfortunately, however, that means it’s a tight competition and you need to be doing a lot MORE right to really edge out the competition.

Most of you are hitting on the important opportunities you have with this Google platform for businesses. From including photos of real people, your vehicles, and being out in the community, most of these companies are taking advantage of everything they can here. Many are creating regular posts as well.

Both TLC and Wagner are the top companies making the best use of this wonderful opportunity for businesses. Adding photos to your Google My Business profile is a great way to show some personality, real people having fun at work with people they enjoy working with!

It appears MCS is hardly utilizing this great Google tool at all. Simply adding regular posts, replying to reviews and adding photos would go a long way to help the companies who are hoping to get a lot more attention on Google.

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.

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

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

Take a look at the phone numbers listed below for B Carlson. Which one is correct? 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 Albuquerque were:  

• The window that immediately popped up on MCS‘s website promoting Indoor Air Quality service that hits on a topic of great interest for many people these days. 
• The coupons and the Virtual Technician services available from TLC. A lot of Albuquerque companies are also showing coupons and free estimates or inspections that are appealing to potential customers.

• The chat boxes that catch your attention on several sites including Signature and Wagner.

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 “call today” or “sign up now” only turns them away. Simply having links to services, as seen below from Williams, is not getting anyone’s attention. While the lower “No Contact Service Calls” might get noticed, they’ve missed that opportunity by not having it link to a page explaining it or their Contact page.

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 Albuquerque are having some problems keeping their site’s pages from being well optimized. A few are having entirely way too many problems here, with TLC being the worst of the bunch.

Remember, 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 page for ABQ. We use a great program to see a page exactly how Google sees it.

Their AC page received a pretty good score of 8.3. Simply adding a few images would further enhance this page even more for best optimization.

Now let’s compare this to another HVAC company’s page for air conditioning repair.  Anderson‘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 3.3 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. TLC 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 7000 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 Anderson and Williams. Ironically, solving just these two problems alone would put them as the best optimized HVAC site in Albuquerque!

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 Albuquerque 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 Albuquerque 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. Each of the companies with the largest amount of technical issues are leading the way in other areas, but someone really needs to look “under the hood”.  Take TLC, for example. Throughout this report they are an example of how to do many things right. However, their many technical issues are keeping them from kicking things into an entirely new gear!

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 Albuquerque compare when it comes to site speed.

Daniels is leading the pack with a perfect site speed on desktop computers (100) and an excellent speed on mobile devices (93). 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, Anderson Air Corps really needs to address it. They have a desktop speed of 23, and a mobile speed of only 6. 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 Albuquerque 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.

This lets us see that while Wagner has about half the number of backlinks that Signature has, the ones they have are of a higher authority. Having 11 authoritative sites giving you back links, such as the case for MCS, is putting them on par with Sunshine who has 1000 backlinks from lesser sites.

TLC 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 Albuquerque 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