Julian Hofmann owns Litsey Heating and Air, a residential and commercial HVAC company based in Louisville, KY. After taking over the company from Mr. Litsey, Julian had done a great job at continuing the company’s reputation and generating many repeat customers off of their great work.
Julian recently approached us asking for help to get Litsey’s digital marketing back on track and generate more quality calls around Louisville.
Before we get into the improvements we recommend, let’s get into our current stats so we know what to look for.
What’s Litsey’s SEO look like?
The website at the time of writing has 50 backlinks and is being ranked on only 11 keywords. For the amount of backlinks we have, we should be generating much more traffic and be at a higher overall score than we are at currently.
The reason for this is the quality of the 50 backlinks currently linking to our website.
For example, besides local citations there’s no website that’s authoritative or relevant which is sending us any link juice.
The reason why this is so important is because Google is looking for local or authoritative signals that signal trust. In other words, overwhelming and abundant proof that Litsey Heating and Air does a great job at HVAC in Louisville.
Through relevancy, we can use our geo-grid to establish links from other Louisville businesses. This tells Google that our website and business has trust, since no Louisville business would link to them if they didn’t.
Fortunately, we also work with Louisville businesses like EternaTurf who sell and install artificial grass turf who we can link to in a relevant way. This isn’t just a “10 best businesses in Louisville” situation, these are real, relevant links which can be mutually beneficial and result in more organic traffic over time.
For authoritative links, articles like this one from a DR 62 website help us tremendously, since Google already recognized us as authoritative. Just like how you would get more publicity if CNN would link to you, you do here as well since our site pushes well above its weight in SEO power.
For our search terms, right now we’re getting most of our traffic from branded keywords. In other words, Litsey’s HVAC is recognized enough where folks are actively searching for them already, hence the current traffic.
What we want to see is us on the first page for “Louisville HVAC”, “commercial hvac louisville ky”, and other relevant keywords that would result in us generating calls. It’s one thing for folks to find us on our own name, but we’d love it if they could find us organically searching for the terms that result in more business for us.
For our GMB (Google Business Profile), we have almost 200 5 star reviews!
This is great as it shows trust in Louisville, since you wouldn’t accrue almost 200 reviews if the company had a poor reputation or performance. But, just like our overall SEO health, there are a few things which can be improved.
For example, our last review was from over a week ago. The review before that was from over a month ago.
Recent positive reviews are even more important than overall number of reviews, since Google wants to make sure that the business is still doing great work.
Imagine if a restaurant cooked great food but was then taken over by someone incompetent and the food quality went down. Recent reviews are a better indicator of the current state of the business, hence, Google prioritizes them so heavily.
We should aim for at least one 5 star review every week to make sure we’re maximizing our impression share here.
We should also be adding more images. Right now there are only 4 on our GMB, and we want to increase that to dozens.
Just like how Google views reviews as important, it also does the same for works completed. We should be having contractors take images and post them here to make sure Google also recognizes our expertise in Louisville.
Unfortunately, the person who originally made this GMB is no longer with Litsey and since they are the owner, it may be difficult for us to personally go in and add these images. We may have to reach out to Google to help resolve this as it will be critical for us growing our organic presence.
What about our website?
Let’s start off with the good – it’s easy to book calls and schedule for estimates. We have our phone number in the top right of the website, and a fleshed out about us page.
We also have individual service pages which show what services we provide for HVAC in Louisville, which is great.
On the home page, I also love this video from Julian on the history of Litsey, what they do, and how they’ve maintained their stellar reputation over the years.
As far as improvements on the home page, we need to state what we do and where we do it immediately. For example, something similar to “Litsey Heating and Air Inc.” followed by “Serving HVAC In Louisville Since 1975” would be great, so customers and Google can clearly see what we do and where we operate in for our local service area.
We also should replace any clipart with real images of contractors in the field. For example, on the front page we have a clipart image of a typical family for “residential services”, when it should be an image of a contractor doing these services themselves.
This might seem insignificant, but it’s crucial to maintaining E-E-A-T standards for local service businesses. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. It’s how Google determines the good actors and trustworthy businesses and sites from everyone else.
In short – we don’t want to use anything which isn’t from our business, since Google can see that and clipart penalizes us and can slow our progress for ranking.
We should include LSPs (local service pages) so Google can crawl in specific areas. For example, this should include Prospect, Jeffersontown, St. Matthews, and other service areas. This is important since when someone searches for “Prospect HVAC”, we can pop up on the first page in Google.
We can also make use of PAA questions, which are the questions that others are asking on Google related to HVAC in Louisville.
The good news is that we can also ChatGPT for questions and answers directly and then paste it on our website. By answering these questions directly, we have the opportunity to appear on more pages in Google around Louisville for HVAC terms, since we’re following E-E-A-T by generating real relevant content.
Lastly, we need more images and videos of work being completed across all of our channels. Just like how our GMB lacked authoritative images, we have a similar problem directly on our website.
Right now the site is hosted on Squarespace, so we’d want to get that over to WordPress so we can add specific plugins to help us. This is also important since WordPress on average ranks much higher than other website builders for hosting.
What can Litsey Heating and Air do to generate more quality calls in the short-term?
Website and GMB improvements are crucial for us to get more quality calls over time, but this is a long term game. Even if everything was magically fixed today, it would still be a few weeks before most of our improvements would be visible. So in the meantime, what can we do to generate more calls?
The easiest lever to pull immediately would be optimizing our local service ads. LSAs are wonderful because they’re pay-per-call instead of pay-per-click or impression in the case of FB ads.
This means that if we’re not generating quality calls, we simply don’t get charged, meaning the risk is close to 0 for wasting ad spend. And since LSA and GMB are linked, we can piggyback off of our positive reviews in Google quite easily.
The next step would be to generate more calls through Google PPC. This takes longer to do reliably through iteration, but once it’s working it can produce a massive ROI for us assuming a cost per quality call of under $100.
Once our team has access we’re excited to get in here and work our magic.
What’s next?
The good news is that Litsey Heating and Air already have established a reputation of excellence in Louisville. Our job is to promote that proof to Google via images and videos. This is true organically (GMB and website) and on ads through LSA and other platforms.
We want to share with Google that we do a fantastic job in our local service area through undeniable proof. Once that’s clear, we’ll win.