I build and improve websites for commercial HVAC, mechanical and refrigeration service contractors. Before I touch the site, I set up the tracking, so you can see which agreements and which bid invitations actually came from it.
I did this in September 2026. The first page was residential HVAC agencies, listicles ranking residential HVAC agencies, and outbound telemarketing firms offering to cold-call on your behalf. What was not on it was a single page written for a contractor who sells planned maintenance agreements to building owners.
One of the largest home-services marketing agencies in the country was sitting near the top of that page for a phrase with the word commercial in it. Its copy describes its customer as a homeowner searching to hire a heating and air conditioning company. Its proof is three residential case studies. That is not a company doing commercial work badly. It is a company that does not do commercial work at all, occupying the space where someone who does should be.
Rankings move, so the order will be different by the time you read this. The pattern will not be. Nobody has built for you, which is why you keep ending up with an agency that thinks your customer is a homeowner with a broken furnace.
I want to be straight about this, because most of what you have been pitched depends on you not thinking about it too hard.
Your work does not arrive through search. It arrives through referrals, through the GC who already knows you, through a property management relationship, through the bid list, and through displacing whoever holds the agreement when it comes up for renewal. You know that better than I do.
But every one of those people looks you up. The GC's project manager building a bid list. The facility manager checking out the name a peer gave him. The owner's rep confirming you are real before the walkthrough. A site that reads residential, has no project detail, no equipment specifics and a copyright date from four years ago answers their question badly, and it answers it about a contractor whose reputation had already done the hard part.
That is the job. Everything else is upside.
If an agency tells you they are getting your cost per lead down to forty dollars, they are telling you that homeowners are filling in your form.
It gets worse from there, because the ad platform learns. Every unqualified submission teaches it what a good prospect looks like, and it goes and finds you more of them. The number on the report improves every month while the work gets worse.
Your deals are large and they take months to close. A cost-per-lead figure cannot describe that, because it counts the wrong event at the wrong end of the process. The numbers that would tell you something are what a qualified request for quote costs you and what an awarded contract costs you, and almost nobody reports either.
Some of what fixes this is unglamorous and specific. A square-footage floor on the form. A building-type field with no residential option. A call-duration threshold before a call counts as anything. It is not clever work. It is just work that nobody does, because it makes the monthly lead number go down.
The industry sells you leads because leads are easy to sell. Nobody sells you the harder truth, which is that your best work already comes from people who know you, and that the job is to stop losing it.
This is the part that is specific to your business rather than to marketing in general.
Your cycle runs in months, not weeks. That means by the time an agreement is signed, whatever the ad platform recorded about that visitor is long stale, and the connection between the click and the contract is gone unless somebody deliberately carried it through. Almost nobody does.
So I set up call tracking by channel, form attribution with the source and landing page stored, and conversion tracking configured against inquiries rather than pageviews. Then leads get logged into whatever system you already run. All of it before I rewrite a page or publish anything.
Not at launch. Not in month three. First, so there is a baseline to compare against, and so that when an agreement is finally signed you can point at it and say where it came from.
I look at your website, how you are showing up for commercial searches, and where your inquiries are coming from now. You get the findings in writing, yours to keep.
A 90-day plan in priority order: what I would fix, what it involves, and what I expect it to change. If the biggest problem is something I do not handle, I will tell you that.
Then I do the work. Tracking goes in first, before I change the design, write new content, or start on SEO. Reporting starts in month one.
A full rebuild, not a reskin. Structure and messaging built around what a facility manager, a GC's project manager and a building owner each need to see before they will put you on a list. Equipment and capability clarity, project detail, service-area and response structure, the agreement side of the business given its own room instead of one paragraph at the bottom. Tracking built in from day one.
See what is includedOngoing SEO, content and technical work, with a monthly report showing where inquiries came from and what I am doing next. For a contractor with several service lines, a refrigeration division or more than one market, that usually means content across each of them rather than a single page trying to speak to everyone.
See what is includedAfter the audit I will tell you which one makes sense, if either does.
You know this better than I do, so I am not going to put numbers on it that I cannot stand behind.
A planned maintenance agreement is never just its own contract value. It carries repair and replacement work behind it, at better margins than installation, and most of it renews. That is why a book of agreements is worth more to a buyer than a larger pile of one-off repair revenue, and why the firms that have shifted weight from plan-spec construction toward contracted service are the ones being bought.
There are published figures on all of that. Most of them come from software vendors and acquisition advisers with something to sell, and I am not going to quote them at you as though they were your trade association's numbers. If you have MCAA or MSCA benchmark data, that is the real thing, and I would rather build the case on your own numbers than on somebody's blog post.
Here is the part that does not need a citation. Adding agreements is the single thing that most changes what your business is worth. Your website is either helping you win them at renewal or quietly costing you a place on the list. The agreements coming up for renewal in your market over the next eighteen months are going to somebody. The only question is whether the people deciding can find a reason to pick you.
There are at least fifty data centres proposed, under construction or operating in the Kansas City area. Meta is building a billion-dollar campus in the Northland. Google has a billion-dollar site near Worlds of Fun and a much larger project in Smithville. Industrial vacancy across the metro sits at four and a half percent, and construction was the fastest-growing employment sector in the metro last year.
Every one of those buildings is a mechanical service annuity. Cooling systems in a data centre do not get installed and forgotten; they get serviced, upgraded and replaced on a cycle, forever. And mission-critical service exposure is the most valuable thing you can be building in this category right now.
I am in Kansas City. I know that whether you are signatory or open shop changes who you bid against, and that service work runs under a different labour agreement than construction. If you want to talk about your own market instead of a case study from somewhere else, that is a short drive.
I will look at your website, how you are showing up for commercial searches, and where your inquiries are coming from now. Then you get the findings in writing and a 90-day plan in priority order, whether or not you hire me. If the real problem turns out to be something I do not handle, I will tell you that too.
Request a Free AuditNo. This page is for contractors whose work is commercial, industrial or institutional. Residential HVAC marketing is a crowded field and there are people who do it well. The reason I built this page is that almost nobody is doing the commercial side.
Because those people look you up before they act. The referral gets your name in the room; the website decides whether it stays there. Most commercial mechanical sites I see are construction brochures with the service and agreement side missing entirely, which is the part a facility manager is trying to evaluate.
Search work takes months, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What I will do is tell you at thirty days and again at sixty whether it is tracking against what I said to expect, and if it is behind I will tell you why before you have to ask. Tracking goes in during week one, so the reporting starts immediately even though the results do not.
Yes. Refrigeration is a different sale — the buyer is often a district or corporate facilities manager across a portfolio of sites, the urgency is measured in hours rather than days, and the compliance side around refrigerant management is becoming its own reason to be found. If refrigeration is a real part of your business it usually deserves its own page rather than a paragraph.
It is yours. The site, the content, the tracking configuration and the reporting all stay with you. There is nothing to unwind and nothing held hostage.
I do. There is no account manager between you and it, and your project does not get handed to a junior team after the sale. If you have a question about your numbers, you are asking the person who pulled them.