SEO Audit for Star Heating & Cooling: How to Improve Your HVAC Business’s Online Presence for Better Results

Star Heating & Cooling, an HVAC company serving the Noblesville, Indiana area, ran a multi-week audit with Dennis Yu that exposed an overpriced legacy SEO vendor, a five-year-old underperforming Local Services Ads account, and a backyard of local keywords worth owning — then turned a weekly metrics habit into real ranking gains.

Measure Every Call by Source, Every Friday

The audit opened by wiring up tracking so each lead can be traced to its origin. Star runs ServiceTitan, which records the calls and the source they come from, so the three Google channels — Google Ads, Local Service Ads, and Google Business Profile — can be measured separately instead of lumped together.

From there, Dennis set a standing weekly cadence: one Metrics-Analysis-Action review every Friday, owned by someone on Star’s team rather than left to an agency. In a single tracked week that review counted 18 booked calls broken out across existing customers, website leads, Google Ads, and Local Service Ads — the kind of visibility that lets you change one thing a week and see what moved.

Analyze the Backlinks You Actually Have

A scan of the domain showed roughly 700 backlinks and about 320 ranking keywords. The number matters less than the relevance: Star ranks well right around its Noblesville profile, but keywords pointing at places like Missouri do nothing for a local HVAC company. Owning your service-area keywords is, as Dennis put it, like owning your own backyard.

Link quality told the same story. One backlink came from USA Today but looked paid and thin on context — the kind of link a previous vendor buys to pad a report. A link from an irrelevant site or another country reads better than nothing, but it still isn’t the goal. Relevant, contextual links in the right geography are what move local rankings.

The vendor relationship was its own finding. The prior SEO company charged at least $8,900 a month and at least reported on keywords and backlinks; the replacement cut costs roughly in half but stopped reporting on keywords or backlinks at all. Cheaper is not the same as transparent — and right now nobody could see the SEO work being done.

Vet Lead Quality Before You Scale Spend

When the team reviewed leads coming off the Facebook ads, the cracks showed: some phone numbers were disconnected, some emails bounced, and a few leads sat outside the service area entirely — Mishawaka and Lafayette are not Star’s territory. Counting leads is not the same as counting good leads.

The fix is to feed reality back to the platform. The plan is to pipe conversion data into Facebook with LeadsBridge so the algorithm optimizes toward people who actually book, not just anyone who fills a form. On the local side, service areas are better defined by county than by a loose radius so the ads stop fishing outside the map.

Build the Content and Links That Rank Locally

The SEO play is straightforward and was already showing movement: Star climbed to the top two-to-three results for its own name and saw gains on equipment terms like Carrier gas furnaces. The engine to keep that going is more E-E-A-T content paired with relevant backlinks, tracked over time with a geo-grid so you can watch your ranking spread across the map. The owner has taught heating and air conditioning for years — that expertise is exactly the raw material authentic content needs.

Two access problems stand in the way and both are worth pushing on. The current marketing company is reluctant to grant admin access to the WordPress site, which blocks publishing the blog content and on-page work that earns more keywords. And the Local Services Ads account is over five years old and not producing the volume it should, so a fresh account is being stood up. On the paid-social side, a dollar-a-day test surfaces the videos people actually watch — and once a Facebook pixel is on the site, those engaged viewers and past visitors can be retargeted cheaply for booked jobs.

This is the same MAA discipline applied to a home-service business — if you want the framework behind it, read why MAA and LDT drive strategy and how E-E-A-T content earns local rankings.