Donnivan paid Red Palm Marketing $3,500 a month for six months to grow Southern Comfort Heating & Air in Houston — and this HVAC SEO audit found the rankings went down, not up. More than a dozen local keywords dropped to “Lost” over the same period the invoices were paid. Here is what $21K actually bought, and how to reverse it.
$21K
six months at $3,500/mo while rankings declined
15+
local keywords that fell to “Lost” after the spend
82
mobile PageSpeed, short of the 90+ where conversions live
Southern Comfort serves Houston and nearby Rosenberg and Sugar Land. The Ahrefs data from December 2025 tells the story plainly: organic rankings fell versus September, the start of the engagement. When you spend real money and the only terms that improve are your own brand name, the SEO is not working — and the data shows exactly where.
Read What The Keyword Data Reveals
Across the 20 tracked keywords, the wins were branded and the losses were commercial. “Southern comfort ac and heating” nudged from position 29 to 20, and “southern heating and air” from 55 to 44. Those are people who already knew the name — they do not represent new demand.
The money terms went the other way. High-intent local searches that should drive calls collapsed off the board entirely, which is the opposite of what six months of paid SEO should produce.
| Keyword | Position change | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| southern comfort ac and heating | 29 → 20 | Branded; improved but no new demand |
| thermostat repair near me | 16 → Lost | A page-two local term, gone |
| emergency ac repair near me | 53 → Lost | High-intent emergency call, gone |
| ac repair rosenberg | 64 → Lost | Core service-area term, gone |
| southern comfort heating and air | 31 → Lost | Even a branded term dropped off |
RUN THIS YOURSELF
In Ahrefs, pull the client’s organic keywords for the start and end of an agency engagement and compare positions side by side. If the improvements are all branded and the losses are all commercial, the spend bought nothing that makes the phone ring. That one before-and-after is how a young agency owner proves a refund conversation is warranted.
Fix The Technical Gaps Holding Rankings Back
The site structure is clean and the on-page work is genuinely strong — location-specific titles like “AC Repair in Rosenberg, TX,” 800-plus-word service pages, and natural keyword usage. The problem is what is missing underneath. There is no LocalBusiness, Service, or Review schema on the pages sampled, which leaves Google guessing about the entity.
Speed is the other gap. Google’s own tool rates mobile performance at 82 out of 100, and the target is 90-plus — mobile is where roughly 80% of conversions happen and intent runs highest. Compressing images, minifying scripts, and adding JSON-LD schema are concrete fixes that let the strong content finally get credit.
Reverse The Declines And Rebuild Authority
Start by auditing what the prior agency changed and resubmitting the sitemap in Google Search Console. The low keyword-difficulty scores and lost positions point to a domain with little authority, so the backlink profile needs a hard look for toxic or spammy directory links left behind — the kind that can drag rankings down rather than lift them.
From there, the path is straightforward: rebuild dedicated pages for the lost terms like emergency AC repair, earn real local citations from Houston-area partnerships instead of paid links, and work the issues through a measure-analyze-act loop. That is the MAA framework in practice, where every finding becomes a prioritized action. The same diagnostic runs end to end in the Quick Audit process.
RUN THIS YOURSELF
View the source of a client’s top service page and search it for “LocalBusiness” or “application/ld+json.” If there is no schema, Google is reading strong copy with no structured signal attached. Adding JSON-LD is a fast, high-leverage win you can ship the same week and watch in Search Console.
THE DELIVERABLE
See What Your SEO Spend Actually Bought
We pull your keyword history, site speed, and backlinks apart the same way we did for Southern Comfort — and tell you what to fix first to win back lost calls.
Get Your Own Quick Audit →Power Hour with Dennis →Local Service Spotlight · Free Quick Audit
Want this kind of analysis for your business? Get your free audit.
In about 5 minutes you’ll get a real diagnosis of where you stand in Google and AI search — plus a prioritized action plan tied to revenue, not vanity metrics. Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice, so we start with your data. Then you decide: implement it yourself (even with your own AI agents), or have our trained AI Builders do it for you.
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Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, a platform that amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using the Content Factory process. He is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other brands.
Dennis has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs by partnering with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Through Local Service Spotlight, he teaches the Dollar a Day strategy and Content Factory training to help local service businesses enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring.
Dennis coaches young adult agency owners serving plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians, and believes there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers must be certified.