An HVAC owner opens Keyword Planner, pastes in the website of the company that keeps outbidding them, and waits. The list that comes back has "furnace repair" in it. It also has "plumbers near me," "clogged toilet" and "tankless water heater," a few hundred rows apart.
Nothing is broken. Keyword Planner read the competitor's website and handed back what that business sells. The tool doesn't know which parts of that business are yours. Sorting is your job, and it is most of the work in keyword research.
This chapter walks through that sort with real numbers: twelve HVAC competitors in one example market, Indianapolis, run through Keyword Planner, 15,008 keyword ideas, and where each kind of idea belongs. The method works the same wherever your trucks run.
Google's Preview Tool Shows Which HVAC Companies Bid in Your Market. Clicking Their Ads Teaches You Nothing More.
Start by finding out who is bidding. Google's Ad preview and diagnosis tool sits under Troubleshooting in your account. Type "furnace repair," set the location to a suburb you serve, and the page fills with whoever is paying for that homeowner tonight. Google recommends it over searching Google yourself, because the tool doesn't count as an impression on your own ads or muddy your numbers.
Type the searches that pay your bills: "furnace repair," "ac repair," "heat pump repair," "new furnace." Set the location to your service area, not your office. Write down every HVAC company whose ad shows up.
Leave their ads unclicked. Every tap on a rival's furnace ad lands on their bill, and their website is one typed address away anyway. Paid clicks you don't intend to buy from are noise in somebody's account, and you'd want the same courtesy back.
The companies on your list become your seed sites for the next step.
Nine in Ten Ideas From a Heating-and-Plumbing Competitor's Site Were Plumbing: 1,759 of 1,911.
Keyword Planner has an option called "Start with a website." You give it a web address, and Google pulls keyword ideas from what that site is about. Pick your service area as the location first. The search counts and bid figures that come back describe whatever area you picked, so Indianapolis numbers need Indianapolis selected.
We ran twelve HVAC company websites from our example market through it, one at a time, set to the Indianapolis area. Together they returned 15,008 different keyword ideas.
Here is what surprised us. Nine of the twelve companies sell plumbing. You would expect plumbing to show up in most of the lists. It didn't:
- One company that does heating, cooling and plumbing got back 1,911 ideas, and 1,759 of them were plumbing.
- A second multi-trade company's list was 47% plumbing.
- Nine of the twelve lists were under 2% plumbing or electrical, including one from a company that sells heating, cooling, plumbing and electrical work.
Across all twelve, 2,809 ideas were plumbing or electrical, and 2,634 of those came from just two seed sites. Google says it pulls ideas from the content on the site, and in our run that meant what the site talks about most, not every trade the company offers. Seed with a site whose pages are mostly about drains, and drains come back.
So the seed site decides how much sorting you'll do. Run several competitors, not one, and expect each list to lean the way its website leans.
Your own website deserves the same run. The ideas Google pulls from it are a rough mirror of what your pages actually say. If your site talks about "comfort solutions" for six paragraphs and mentions furnace repair once, the ideas that come back will tell you.
10,532 of 15,008 Ideas Were Heating and Cooling. Sort Those by the Job, and Send the Rest Somewhere Else.
Once the lists are in, sort every idea into a pile by what it is. Ours came out like this:
- Heating and cooling: 10,532 ideas. "Ac repair," "furnace repairs," "heat pump repair near me," dozens of ways to type each one.
- Plumbing and electrical: 2,809.
- Equipment brands: 423. Searches with a manufacturer's name in them.
- Rival HVAC companies' names: 405.
- Non-buyers: 239. Jobs, how-to, parts, "cheap," "free."
- Everything else: 600. Towns well outside the market, commercial services, odd strings.
The heating and cooling pile is the one you build on. Each idea goes into the job ad groups from Chapter 4: AC repair, furnace repair, heat pump repair, AC replacement, furnace replacement, tune-ups. About five or six keywords per group, every one meaning the same job, so one ad and one page fit all of them.
At launch, those keywords go live on exact match. Google gives priority to an exact match keyword that is identical to the search, which is the control you want while you learn what a furnace call costs in your market. Chapter 6 covers how the account opens up from there.
The plumbing pile depends on your business. If you plumb, it's a real opportunity, and it gets its own campaign with its own budget, because a drain call and a furnace call shouldn't compete for the same dollars. If you don't plumb, every one of those ideas is a search you never want to pay for.
The equipment-brand pile needs a decision on each keyword, not a rule:
- "Bryant furnace repair" is a homeowner with a broken Bryant. That's a repair search, and it belongs in the furnace repair group if you service that brand.
- "Lennox air conditioning system" is a shopper comparing models, maybe on a manufacturer's site. Park it until you run replacement ads, if ever.
The last pile, everything else, takes one careful read. Ours held searches for commercial service companies in towns an hour south of Indianapolis, and a handful of spellings no homeowner types twice. Keep the towns you actually serve, since "furnace repair" plus a suburb's name is a buyer. Send the rest to the negative list or simply leave them out.
405 Ideas Were Other HVAC Companies' Names. They Belong on the Negative List, Not in an Ad Group.
Seed a competitor's website and you get their name back, typed every way people type it. One national franchise's list alone held 182 variations of its own brand name. Across all twelve lists, 405 ideas were the names of HVAC companies.
All 405 belong on the negative keyword list, where a rival's name blocks your AC and furnace ads instead of triggering them. A homeowner who types a company's name already picked that company. Paying to interrupt them is expensive and rarely works.
Could you run ads on competitor names on purpose? Only in a campaign of its own, built and measured separately, if and when it ever makes sense. That's a big if, and it's never part of a launch.
Your own company name is different. It gets a campaign of its own too, so your brand searches don't make your furnace repair numbers look better than they are.
The non-buyer pile goes negative as well: "hvac jobs," "how to reset furnace," "ac parts," "cheap ac repair," "free furnace inspection." Some of those people will hire someone eventually. None of them is calling today.
One detail catches people out. Google's negative keywords don't stretch to close variants the way regular keywords do. A negative for "plumber" doesn't block "plumbers." Add the plurals, the common misspellings and the obvious synonyms yourself.
Keyword Planner's Bid Range Is a Starting Point, Not a Price Tag.
Next to each idea, Keyword Planner shows two bid figures. Google's help page pegs the low column at about the 20th percentile and the high column at about the 80th, measured on bids that won a top-of-page spot in the area you selected.
In the Indianapolis area, "furnace repair" showed $17.69 to $65.04. "Ac repair" showed $34.39 to $105.00. Those ranges are wide because they cover everyone: the franchise bidding hard in July and the two-truck shop bidding at noon in April.
Our rule of thumb from running accounts: real costs tend to come in somewhere within 30% above or below those figures. Use the range to set a first bid and to spot the searches you can't afford yet, then let your own account's real costs replace the estimate as they come in. A bid range from past auctions tells you what the room paid. It doesn't tell you what a furnace call is worth to you. Chapter 3 does that math.
Negatives Matter Most Once Broad Match Starts. From Then On, Somebody Reads the Search Terms Every Morning.
We call the first stage Isolation. Only the furnace, AC and heat pump searches you can predict go live, on exact match, and you set the bids yourself for each ad group. Exact match lets in few surprises, so the negative list you build before launch covers most of the risk.
Exploration comes later. In Exploration, keywords switch to broad match and Google's bidding works toward a target cost per conversion, chasing wordings nobody wrote down. It's where an account finds the wordings no keyword list would have guessed ("house won't stay warm," "ac blowing hot air upstairs"). It's also where competitor names, job seekers and plumbing searches come back in far larger numbers than any Keyword Planner list showed.
The usual pace is to open Exploration around months two or three. The real gate is volume: about 30 quality conversions a month, so a busy account gets there sooner.
Once broad match is on, the search terms report is the first screen of the morning, like checking the dispatch board, and the negative list picks up new entries all season. It is never finished. A list you built once and never touched is a furnace filter nobody changed: fine for a while, then quietly expensive.
Next: "No Heat" at 2 A.M. Is a Search You Can Predict. The Odd Wordings Around It Aren't.
Your keywords are in their piles, your ad groups are filled, and the searches you never want are locked out before launch. Chapter 4 built the ad groups and pages, Chapter 3 priced the jobs, Chapter 2 picked which searches to buy first, and Chapter 1 set up tracking. Chapter 6 covers how an account moves from the searches you can list to the ones you can't.
The full rollout, from tracking to seasonal budgets, maintenance plans and new-system ads, is on the guide's home page.
For HVAC companies on our Google Ads management, rival brands and "hvac jobs" searches are blocked before the first furnace ad runs, and every broad-match morning starts with the search terms report. Doing it yourself? Seed Keyword Planner with the three companies that outbid you on "furnace repair," then tally which ideas match a job on your own price sheet.
