Before the first cold night: HVAC and plumbing

The summer emergency calls have tailed off and the first cold night has not arrived. For HVAC and plumbing companies this is the quietest fortnight of the year, and it is also the fortnight that decides how the heating season goes.

Most of the contractors we work with spend it catching up on paperwork. That is understandable and it is a waste, because every lever that matters in November is cheap to pull in September and expensive to pull in November. When the first hard freeze lands, everybody’s cost per lead goes up at once, your competitors’ budgets go up with it, and the only thing that separates the companies that have a good winter from the ones that do not is work that was already done.

Here is what we are doing in home services accounts this month.

Local Services Ads: the answer rate is the setting

If you run Local Services Ads, the most important thing you can change in September is not the budget. It is whether the phone gets answered.

Google decides who gets shown on a mix of proximity, your review score and volume, your budget, the business hours you set, and how responsive you are to the leads you already get. Answering matters twice over: a missed call is a lead you paid for and lost, and it feeds back into how often you get shown at all.

In the accounts we run, the September answer rate is almost always worse than the owner believes, because the office is thinly staffed while the techs finish off summer work and nobody notices a quiet phone ringing out. Check it now, when a missed call costs you one job, rather than in December when it costs you five.

The rest of the Local Services list for this month:

• Dispute bad leads promptly. Wrong service, wrong area, spam. Do it as they come in rather than in a monthly sweep, and do not let the credits go unclaimed.
• Set business hours honestly. If you take calls at nine in the evening, say so and get the leads. If you do not, do not advertise into hours where the phone rings out.
• Ask for Local Services reviews through the dashboard. They are separate from the reviews on your Google My Business listing and they feed your ranking in the ads specifically. Most contractors have a healthy listing and almost nothing on the ads side.
• Raise the weekly budget before the cold, not after. The first freeze is the worst possible moment to discover your budget cap.
• Keep the Google Guaranteed badge current. Licence and insurance documents expire quietly and the badge goes with them.

While you are looking at phones, check your listing’s call history if it has reached you yet. Google rolled it out to business listings over the summer, and it shows answered and missed calls from the listing. For a contractor whose office is one person, that log is usually the most useful page on the internet.

Search campaigns before the first cold night

Emergency work and planned work are two different businesses that happen to use the same phone number, and the accounts that do well in winter treat them that way.

Split them. Emergency intent (“no heat”, “furnace not working”, “burst pipe”) wants a different ad, a different landing page and a much higher tolerance on cost per lead than planned intent (“furnace replacement cost”, “heat pump installation”, “boiler service”). Running them in one campaign with one budget means the emergency traffic eats the budget on the coldest week and the replacement pipeline starves.

Then the housekeeping that nobody does in December:

1. Negatives. Parts, manuals, DIY, “how to”, wiring diagrams, jobs and hiring, and any equipment brand you do not service. Pull the search terms report for last winter and mine it.
2. Geography. Service area radius that matches where you will actually send a truck in the snow, not where you would go in June.
3. Dayparting and after-hours. If nobody answers at midnight, either pull back the bids or send those clicks to a form that says when you will call.
4. Ad text. Responsive search ads are the default now, and at the end of last month Google said expanded text ads can no longer be created or edited after 30 June next year. If your account still leans on the old format, rebuild it while the phone is quiet rather than in the middle of a cold snap.
5. Landing pages. Phone number in the header on mobile, the service and the city in the first line, and financing stated plainly if you offer it. Replacement quotes are decided on finance terms more often than on brand.

The customers you already have

The cheapest heating season pipeline is the list in your own system, and September is when it is worth something.

Pull three lists. Everyone who had an air conditioning repair this summer and does not have a heating plan. Everyone whose system you know is over twelve years old, from your own service notes. Everyone on a maintenance plan whose heating visit has not been booked.

Then work them in that order with a tune-up offer and a real date. Not “call us to schedule”. An email and a text that say “we have Tuesday the 21st and Thursday the 23rd open in your area”. Booked tune-ups in September and October do three jobs at once: they fill the shoulder weeks, they find the systems that will fail in January while you can still quote a replacement calmly, and they give you a natural moment to ask for a review from someone who is not upset.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Reviews collected in the shoulder are from customers who had a planned visit that went fine. Reviews collected in January are from people whose house was cold. Build the stock now.

What to do this month

• Measure your answer rate for two weeks, including the hours when the office is thin, and staff the worst one.
• Split emergency and planned campaigns, with separate budgets, before the first freeze.
• Mine last winter’s search terms report for negatives and add them now.
• Rebuild any remaining old-format ad text as responsive search ads while the account is calm.
• Send a tune-up offer with named open dates to your summer repair customers and your ageing-equipment list.
• Add a review request to the end of every tune-up visit, through Local Services as well as your listing.

None of this is clever. It is just work that is almost free in September and nearly impossible in December. If you want a hand with it, this is the season our home services clients lean on us most, and most of the lift sits in Google Ads and Local Services plus a review flow that keeps running while the techs are busy.