Best HVAC Companies in Des Moines

Are you tired of seeing Schaal, Bell Brothers, and Lozier at the top of Google?

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 Des Moines.

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 Des Moines 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 Des Moines (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.

Nothing is going to communicate trust like real photos of actual people who stand behind the service they provide.

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!

Some of the best (and worst) examples I came across are:

Golden Rule Plumbing, Heating & Cooling has a lot going for it:

• Great use of colors  
• Great taglines like “always here for you” and “honest and reliable quality service” 
• Personalized trucks show that this is an established company  
• Navigation is clear and easy to follow  
• Trust signals  
• Community involvement  

Personally, I love the personality – the REAL people you find on the Wyckoff and Schaal website! THIS is what your customers are looking for – somebody they believe is good at what they do and will stand behind their work if something goes wrong.

On the other hand, some of the HVAC companies in Des Moines have issues that are real turn-offs for potential customers.

Few things will turn visitors away from your site faster than stock photos.

A website that is devoid of personality can get 1,000 visits a month but only a handful of phone calls.

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.

This example above could be for roofing, fence building or a website about assembling rockets. 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!

Great rankings and traffic won’t grow your business. 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. As you can see, some aren’t even trying.

The biggest mistake we see when it comes to videos on a website is how far down the page they are, often not even on the homepage!  

Of the fourteen HVAC companies I looked at in Des Moines, I could only find a handful that have videos.  

Connett has one on their site that isn’t bad, but it would get 5x the views if it were further up the page.  

Schaal has a TON of superb videos! They have some really great ones including with the former owner and the new owner, 70 years in business, giving away 70 air conditioners, matching rebates, discounts of up to $3,300, etc.

Unfortunately, these great videos are buried with 13 other pages on the About Us tab.

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? Not many, it turns out.

Green’s Appliance, Heating & Cooling only has a simple website, but what they do have is plenty of the “heart” that many customers are looking for!

1958!

This is the kind of company I want to do business with!

All their techs have been with the company for at least FIVE YEARS! That says a great deal!

This is a great video.

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 “Who We Are” 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.

Same deal with the Connett website:

And Lozier (just to name a few):

I was working on another section of this case study when I stumbled across this link on the Holt Plumbing and Heating website to a FANTASTIC piece of content put together by HVAC Today. 

But as great as this is, the link is too subtle, and it’s keeping potential customers from seeing it.

⦁ I would make this a lot easier for visitors to find.
⦁ The article also needs to open in a new tab – not take visitors away from your site!

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 Des Moines that has rich and genuinely helpful content. By taking the time to do that well, you’re HANDING Google what it’s looking for.

Of the 14 companies we researched for this case study, Schaal stands out when it comes to content!

The content on the pages itself is a little dry, and it would help to break it up a bit with sub-headings, bullets, a couple more images, maybe a quote from the owner to avoid such big blocks of text, but it’s certainly better than most.

Schaal has so many pages that target specific services, which makes it easy for Google to see who they are, what they do, and that they are good at it!

Hats off to Wyckoff for having recent content and targeting popular search terms!

Unfortunately, a lot of their service pages are super thin.

Or empty.

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 some of the HVAC companies in Des Moines are really hitting it out of the ballpark, so many others are falling way behind, and there’s an amazing opportunity there for them.

Golden Rule has the most reviews with 2180 and 4.2 stars!
Service Legends has 1267 and 4.8 stars!
But the best yet is Schaal, with 1,312 reviews and 4.9 stars!

Holt also has an impressive 668 reviews with 4.9 stars!

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’s a tight race for Des Moines companies.

Some statistics about the Google My Business profiles for these fourteen companies:

⦁ All 14 of them have an accurate category (your industry)
⦁ 10 have a recent post, which is a short message about a special or something going on in the business
⦁ 8 have some sort of call to action on their profile
⦁ 3 have photos of their actual shop or office
⦁ The average number of photos is 59, with the most photos going to Golden Rule, Lenz, Connett, and Best, respectively.
⦁ 4 have videos

This is a great chance for you to show some personality, real people laughing having fun at work with people they enjoy working with!

What you DON’T want on your Google profile is anything that makes it hard for Google to trust who you are and what you do!

Stock photos are a big no-no!

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 14 HVAC companies, how many of them have conflicting details, and how many are missing a presence on 85 of the most popular platforms.

The three strongest companies in this areas are:

⦁ Schaal
⦁ Lozier
⦁ Connett

The company with the most challenges was Golden Rule. Ouch – 11% missing and 89% are incorrect.

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, they 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 Des Moines were:  

• The pop-up on the Modern website. Pop-ups can be annoying but they can also be highly effective. I bet an offer of 40% off on a new furnace is enticing enough to get some clicks!

• I am a big fan of a LIVE CHAT. If done right, it can be super impactful to your bottom line!

• While it’s hard to beat a FREE Super Tune-Up, some people may be unwilling to supply so much information. They would be more likely to fill this out if all they had to enter was a first name and phone number.

Anything that entices visitors to your website to CLICK on something and take some kind of ACTION increases the chances of them calling your office!

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.

It is borderline difficult to even find the phone number to the Modern Heating & Air website.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is also the easiest. Just put your phone number at the top and bottom of all your pages and make it easy to see. That single change alone could immediately result in more phone calls coming in!

Would you sign up for the newsletter from Wyckoff? My guess is not a single human ever has.

WE LOVE CHAT

Only 8 websites out of the 35 (23%) in Des Moines offer click to chat. Having a text chat makes 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.”  

A majority of HVAC companies in Des Moines are doing poorly when it comes to having optimized pages.

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 good optimization is on the AC page for Schaal. We use a great program to see a page exactly how Google sees it.

This central AC page received a score of 7.1, which isn’t too bad (although we aim higher for our clients). Spending literally a couple of minutes to change a few, easy things could really improve page optimization. Hopefully, they’re not paying anyone for SEO as some really basic steps were missed.

Green’s Appliance, Heating & Cooling isn’t much competition for Schaal when people in Des Moines search for “central air conditioning.” There is hardly any content here (less than 300 words). Also, who actually searches for “cooling service”? Their big headline isn’t helping them get people who are searching for the more common search terms “air conditioner” or “ac.”

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 Des Moines 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 Des Moines compare when it comes to technical factors?

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. Schaal is CRUSHING it in 9 of the 12 areas detailed in this case study. However, the two areas of challenge for them are keeping them from kicking things into an entirely new gear!

Having 8012 technical issues is hurting their chances of ranking as well as they could be!

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 Des Moines compare when it comes to site speed

Bell Brothers is leading the pack with a site speed of 89/100.

Wyckoff fared the worst with a site speed (on mobile) of only 6/100.

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 Des Moines 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 Schaal has a lot fewer backlinks then Connett, the ones they have are of a higher authority.

Connett likely has some low-quality websites with links pointing to them.

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 Des Moines 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