Niche Navigators: Air Conditioning / HVAC

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: I am Michael Costin and I'm sitting opposite Arthur Fabik. We're back after a two week hiatus. Two weeks. Two weeks. Has it been that long? It has been that long since another episode of the SEO show, but we're back and refreshed. Before I go any further. Big congratulations to Arthur. Seven years with LocalDigital.

ARTHUR: Thank you. Today. Time flies when you're having fun and SEOing. Time flies when you're SEOing. Yeah. Unfortunately, my little graphic had eight years.

MICHAEL: Yes. We share an internal graphic here whenever people celebrate anniversaries and we got his wrong. But anyway, you get a public podcast. I do. So nothing beats that. Do you know what might beat that?

ARTHUR: Let me guess. You guess. Our new segment, our new series. An exciting new series. Let's talk it up a bit. I'm excited. I'll let you talk it up. Cause you, you named it.

MICHAEL: Well, do you know, do you want to know my dirty little secret?

ARTHUR: You know, my dirty little secret, you used to chat GPT. Yes. To come up with a name for our new segment. Yes. Which was initially called, let me, let me have a look. Industry Takedown. Yes. Which is a shit name.

MICHAEL: It's since been renamed Niche Navigators, which much cooler alliteration iteration always works. So the general principle of Niche Navigators is we're going to dive into a niche, navigate our way around it. Are we diving or digging? We're diving in and then we're digging. We're diving into the niche and we're going to give little examples of things that can be applied from an SEO point of view to that niche that are niche specific. We're navigating it. So what are we starting with? Drum roll? We are your compass to that niche. We're your map. What else are we? A roadmap. We're your GPS unit. Remember GPS units back in the day in your car? Don't you have one in your car? No, but remember you used to have a, like a, I don't know. I'm showing my age, man.

ARTHUR: The physical Tom Tom. Yeah. Tom Tom. Stick it into the, yeah. People still use those. Who? People that don't have a fancy car.

MICHAEL: I know, but you've got your phone now. Anyway, who cares?

ARTHUR: This is not- Pretty sure that's illegal for P platers. True. True. I know for a fact, one of my friends is on her Ps and she can't use her phone as a nav, so she had to go and buy a TomTom. Wow. So there you go.

MICHAEL: Talk about niche. That is a niche market for those guys when they used to have everyone.

ARTHUR: Yeah, Facebook Marketplace is going off with our nav units.

MICHAEL: Gen Z people are probably buying them ironically.

ARTHUR: They are, yeah. Anyway, we digress.

MICHAEL: Let's get into Niche Navigators this week. Drum roll. I don't know what the drum roll is on the soundboard. We're going into the air conditioning space. Air conditioning or HVAC for our friends in America. You excited? Very. I always have to ask if you're excited. You don't look excited. I have to say. You kind of do now.

ARTHUR: I'm trying to hide my excitement.

MICHAEL: So based on our experience working, we work with one of Australia's leading manufacturers of air conditioning. So they actually make the units. Not one of, the. The. leading manufacturer. We've worked with them for many, many, many years. And over the years we've worked with many of their top dealers, the air conditioning companies that go out and, you know, install this stuff. So along the way we've learned what works and what doesn't from an FCA point of view. And we figured we'd dive into it. There's about 11 different areas that we're going to cover off today. Give away some of our secrets. Some of the secret sauce. We're going to navigate that niche for you. Let's jump in. Let's jump in. If only ChatGPT could just do this whole podcast for us, it'd probably be much better, right?

ARTHUR: Well, maybe we should run it through ChatGPT and see what it comes up with after the show. We'll see.

MICHAEL: We'll come back to that. All right. Let's talk about air conditioning.

ARTHUR: So how many areas are we going to cover? 11. 11? 11 different areas. That's a lot.

MICHAEL: So your typical air conditioning company, they service a city, maybe parts of the city or the entire city. A region. Yep. Yep. And they'll typically offer installation. So like sales of the unit installation service repair maintenance. Yep. Commercial and commercial. Yep. Potentially. Yep. All aspects of residential, commercial, and industrial. A lot of them will say. So that's the general gist. Let's start with the homepage, the boring stuff, the obvious stuff. We'll get this out of the way real quick. With your homepage or your onsite content and metadata needs to be optimized for the keyword air conditioning city. Do you agree? I agree. Shouldn't be for a city in another country. It should be the city you target.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I guess again, if you're starting, if you're just starting out, try to go more specific to a location. So don't just start trying to target air conditioning Sydney. If you're an air conditioner based in Wentworthville, sorry, air conditioning manufacturer, sorry, manufacturer dealer based in Wentworthville, because you're not going to outrank a lot of these competitors. That's true. So if you're in a specific area and just starting out, try to go hyperlocal because there's a greater chance you're going to rank.

MICHAEL: Yep. So suburb level or council, you know, like it could be, where'd you say Wentworthville? I don't know what that is. That's a suburb. Blacktown, Penrith, whatever the council is. What's the next suburb over? Cumberland. I know I'm saying the suburb. Oh, the council. Yes. Okay. So start small. Then once you're a bit bigger, it should be really at the top level game for the city because we have some stuff on suburb pages soon. Internal links to the main services in the body copy. So it should be using exact match anchor text. So it would be air conditioning installation or air conditioning maintenance or air conditioning sales somewhere in your body copy linking to that page. You should have an internal link to your suburbs that you service page. Yes. Which we'll come to in a minute. Somewhere in the footer. I like it in the body copy though. Yeah. Yep. Some people go nav, others go footer, generally footers. Yeah. I definitely would always want a link in the body copy of the homepage because the homepage is the strongest page on your site and you'd be sending that sweet, sweet link juice down to your suburb pages. If you have any, if you have any, which a lot of air conditioning companies don't, but we have some stuff on that as well in a sec. One thing I like is testing a little emoji in the title tag to make it stand out against other air con companies that all look quite similar, like a little, uh, snowflake icon. Snowflake. Yep. Or a, like a star or fire, you know, that's anything.

ARTHUR: It could be anything really, but I don't really see too many emojis and page titles anymore. I remember there was a phase where people were testing it out. And like, even when you were searching for SES Sydney, basically everyone had, we had an emoji in our page title for a while.

MICHAEL: What did we go with? I can't even remember.

ARTHUR: Just like the number one or?

MICHAEL: Oh, we had a little, yeah, we did.

ARTHUR: Or a medal or a star or something. I can't remember.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Well, the reason, so I've just done a search for air conditioning city. One of them, they have the little snowflake icon. The other one has a star. They're the only two, no one else does, but see those ones stand out to me looking through the search results now. Yeah. So anything that can encourage click through rate, it's not a bad thing. Little hack there, little just navigating the Niche.

ARTHUR: How often are you going to say that? I don't know.

MICHAEL: Throughout this podcast. You need a little, uh, counter every time it happens. Let's move on to suburb pages. Absolutely love a suburb page for a local service business. Don't you?

ARTHUR: I love a suburb page.

MICHAEL: They're so good. These pages convert really well because instead of someone typing in air conditioning Sydney or what is air conditioning, they're typing in air conditioning company paramatter near me or something.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Whatever suburb they're in. So going back to, I guess, Wentworthville, I don't know why I landed on Wentworthville, but that would be a suburb page for an air conditioning dealer based in Sydney. Yeah.

MICHAEL: They're gone. No. So these traditionally on the air conditioning companies that we've worked on always convert well because the traffic's got more intent we find. You need to be, you need to set these pages up so that it talks about the suburb and everything, but it has big call outs or funnels to send people through to, you know, your service pages or your quote page. Yeah. So you don't just want it to be a wall of text about the suburb, which a lot of businesses do do with their suburb pages.

ARTHUR: So having like a request to quote type form or get in touch form just on the page or even in the footer header. Sorry, I'm getting too confused. Yep. Just to try to get people to convert when they land on it.

MICHAEL: Yes. Big, like a big, like a nice icon, bold heading call out for, you know, get a free quote. Yeah. This month save X percent on Dakin. whatever the case may be to funnel them through to that, from that page. So this suburb page is like an entryway to the site, but then it's on your site to convert that traffic from there.

ARTHUR: So what would be a strategy in terms of rolling out pages, suburb pages? Would you start, I guess, with surrounding suburbs and build those out manually or would you?

MICHAEL: Depends if it was me doing it or if I was an air conditioning company person doing it.

ARTHUR: Okay. If you're an air conditioning company person doing it.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I would start with the suburbs closest to home base probably.

ARTHUR: Like Wentworthville, you'd do Parramatta, Tingabby, Northmead, Westmead, stuff like that. Yep. Capture that area first. Correct. And then broaden it out.

MICHAEL: Yep. Okay. Cause realistically you don't want to be going all the way up to I don't know, Palm beach from Wentworthville. So keep it local. You don't want to be spending a lot of time building suburb pages too. If you're, I guess the other thing you could look at where your ideal customer is coming from, because maybe you want to go after ducted installation down in Oran Park.

ARTHUR: Cause there's lots of new houses being built. So just because you're based in Wentworthville doesn't mean you won't go further for bigger jobs. So.

MICHAEL: So a combination of convenience and where your customers or ideal customers are. Um, the thing with suburb pages is if you were to go and do keyword research for air conditioning Wentworthville, it would have zero search volume. We did an episode recently on, uh, zero volume searches, zero volume keywords, probably two episodes ago or something like that. So check that one out to learn about why we think that doesn't matter. We know for a fact with the air conditioning space that these suburb pages. They get dribs and drabs of traffic, but in totality, when you, once you have hundreds of them, you get a lot of traffic and a lot of leads from them.

ARTHUR: Exactly. And it's easy to rank them a lot easier to rank them than like a more competitive term, like air conditioning Sydney.

MICHAEL: Yep. Well, let's talk about ranking them. What do we do? Well, the title structure that I like title tag, it would be one that's worked in the past for us anyway, suburb name. So the suburb and the word air conditioning. dash installation service repair, and then the brand name. So all of those different services. Yeah, so let's say the example would be Wentworthville air conditioning, hyphen, installation service repair, hyphen, name of the company.

ARTHUR: And that way you're capturing all those different types of keywords. So someone that's searching for air conditioning repair, whatever the sub it is, will land on that page. Correct. Likewise, if they're searching for installation or just air conditioning, that page will capture all those searches.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And then lead with the suburb first, not the word air conditioning first. And normally it's air conditioning suburb. Like is that's a typical way or, you know, air conditioning Sydney, for example, would be lots of volume. I like leading with the suburb because it's a suburb is the main theme of the page. Get that in there instantly. And then the body copy itself. You got to talk about air conditioning, obviously, and all the different services. Then a little bit about the suburb itself. Um, so it's pretty painful stuff.

ARTHUR: Maybe a better map of the suburb. Oh, I love a Google map in bed.

MICHAEL: Just love that. Do you? Yep. They used to be like, uh, I guess. the rumor was that if you embedded YouTube video on the topic or you embed a Google map in an area that helps with the ranking. I don't know about that.

ARTHUR: I didn't know either, but you know, I guess Google maps and I frame the embedded map, right? It is Google. Can't crawl anything in an eye frame. So how does it know what is in that eye frame?

MICHAEL: Good question. Good question. All I know is back in the day. I know.

ARTHUR: I, yeah, I recall. Yeah. It's still good to have a map on there.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Look, if you can be bothered doing it, it doesn't because it makes the page look nicer to further the person landing on it. Um, you should have internal links from that page. So when you're talking about like air conditioning service and air conditioning installation, all those words should always link back up to the main air conditioning service page, which will get to intersect the main pages that you should have in a site.

ARTHUR: What about internal links to other surrounding suburbs? Correct. A hundred percent. Very important.

MICHAEL: Yep. So at the end, you should link to say three or four, you know, other suburbs we service nearby and have them at the bottom. So you're building out a big web, big web of links between all your suburb pages. Then your suburb pages should always link back up to the main suburb list page as well. That's linked from the homepage. It's just a beautiful web cacophony of links. Cacophony. Cacophony.

ARTHUR: Cacophony. What does that mean? I don't know.

MICHAEL: Is that even a word? Yeah.

ARTHUR: It's like a cacophony. Cacophony. Every episode you always throw something out there.

MICHAEL: A harsh discordant mixture of sounds. Well, it is. It's not harsh, but it's a big mixture. Cacophony. I don't know. You have quite the vocabulary. Thank you. Don't need a chat GPT to come up with Niche Navigators. Anyway, that's it, right? What else do we need to talk about suburb pages? I think that's basically it. You could chuck some breadcrumbs in if you wanted to get wild. Yeah, you could definitely do that.

ARTHUR: The homepage.

MICHAEL: That will help in the terminal linking as well. Yeah. Chuck some breadcrumbs in.

ARTHUR: Would you recommend having unique content on all the pages or what are your thoughts on having templated content?

MICHAEL: Well, my affiliate website, that's very template driven, rides a rollercoaster of getting tons of traffic, then getting hammered, tons of traffic, getting hammered. So in an ideal world, they should be pretty, you know, customized. And I know in other industries we've had a lot of success with that. So it comes back to how much time you have and how much you want to do the work. We always are on the side of doing the work because it gets the results and the results stick around longer. So enjoy writing. 50 different variants of air conditioning and suburbs because it's pretty painful stuff. Um, you can go on like Wikipedia and look at the suburb itself and some of the, I guess, history to it and chuck that in the page too, which no one cares about. None of your customers are reading, but it helps add a bit of context to the page and you know, you're covering the topic a bit deeper. All right. I'll let you take service pages.

ARTHUR: Yeah, you really, yeah. Okay. Service pages. So this one is pretty, pretty straightforward. If you're an air conditioning dealer, most of them will be doing, offering different types of services. So everything from installation, repair, maintenance, servicing, like we talked about the different types of residential air conditioning, so ducted and split system, you might do commercial or like even refrigeration. So the strategy here is basically building out pages for each one of the services, making sure that the metadata captures that, making sure that you've got that type of service. So for example, air conditioning, repairs, suburb. Or city.

MICHAEL: Or city, yep. So really I would say at a set, like, yeah, keep it to the city level at the top. Ideally. Don't you reckon? Is that what I said?

ARTHUR: No, you said suburb. Sorry, I meant city. So yes. Whatever area you're trying to go after. Yeah. Yeah. And basically just write the content around that. Quite simple.

MICHAEL: I mean, there's not really that much more to it. Yep. And we've done a ton of episodes. We're not going to cover how to write content on those service pages. Lots of internal linking in this world I would recommend. Yeah. So all of those pages where the opportunity arises in that copy link to the other pages, link back to your main suburb list, link back to the home pages. Yeah. Get a whole cacophony of links going on. Cacophony. Internal links. I'll let you have a bit of fun with our error codes, eh?

ARTHUR: Yeah, error codes are a good one. So we've rolled this out for one of our clients, basically going through and having a look at the different types of air conditioners that they, I guess, sell and install and all the different types of error codes that may come up. They're quite easy to rank for. There's a lot of search volume behind those error codes because people are always searching for it. And the strategy is if someone lands or searches for that code and lands on your site and needs help, needs maintenance or repair, you're ranking there, they'll get in touch with you. So you can do keyword research and have a look and type in, for example, Daikin error codes and it'll come up with a list of dozens and dozens of different codes. Like usually it's like Daikin error code D7. Basically just create a page or an FAQ type page with the code as the title. and then explaining what that error is.

MICHAEL: Yep. So I've just done a search in Google for Dakin error code and the auto-complete has popped out with Dakin error code LCJAUOU4A3. Yeah, there's tons, there's tons. So your title tag is exactly that. Yes. And then your body copy is talking about that. Yep. Now the problem with this is a lot of these people already have air conditioning and they're trying to fix it themselves. So it's not a big moneymaker. Or is it? Well, it could be.

ARTHUR: It's all about how you set your page up. Well, if your air conditioning is broken, they're going to get a new one.

MICHAEL: So, but you need to on that, on those pages be calling out, like you need a little angle that will encourage those people to get in touch with you. Whether it's a free onsite visit to troubleshoot that you then use to upsell the people into whatever it is you need to upsell them to, or some call out like, you know, annual maintenance plan for some crazy low price where you don't need to worry about this stuff anymore. We take care of it for you. So. It's not just putting that content there. It's going to get traffic to your site, but traffic is traffic. You want actual customers out of it. If you're going down that path, it's well worth it, but make sure you're maximizing it.

ARTHUR: All right. That was exciting. Yeah.

MICHAEL: I need a little, just take a moment to compose myself after that. We've been on this hit list there, suburb pages into service pages, into error codes. We're not even halfway done. Grand pages. pretty simple build pages for the brands that you supply. So Dakin, Fujitsu, Samsung, Actron Air, Panasonic, Actron Air, Carrier, Toshiba, Tempozone. There's so many of them. There's a lot. You should have pages in every one of them. And again, very simple, your title tag following a structure of, you know, brand name, city, air conditioning, simple again on the page, have the content targeting all of that, but trying to sell the fact that you might have, you might have specials or offers for those brands. So put them on the page because the traffic's going to come through, but you need to funnel them through to where they're actually going to convert.

ARTHUR: Would you create like a little hub page with all the different brands and some. I've heard crumbs.

MICHAEL: Yep. Yep. Brands. Yep. I would have in the header brands as a top level navigation for sure. With the link, you know, the more dropping down on the homepage. Traditionally air conditioning companies have all the logos and they're more links to the individual pages. Love it. It's beautiful stuff. Um, Then let's talk, you can do comparisons of your brands.

ARTHUR: So brand A versus brand B. Talk about different specs. Benefits. Benefits. Pros and cons. Kilowatts, sizes. Yep. Yep. Energy efficiency, stuff like that.

MICHAEL: Well, I've got, we've got a little topic on that in a sec. So yeah, but absolutely. So it's just sort of like the SaaS approach. Like you'll see, you'll see it all the time where different brands that might be, um, let's say active campaign versus MailChimp and they list out all the reasons why. Funnily enough, whatever website you're on is the one that's better than the one they're comparing themselves to. Like in the case of air conditioning companies, you can do Fujitsu versus Dakin because people would search for that.

ARTHUR: So yeah, although you sell both, you could just have the content there already. Yep. I don't know if you'd favor one or the other. Maybe you would, maybe you've got a better deal with.

MICHAEL: Yeah. That's typically what will happen. The one, whoever you sell the most volume and get the best rebate with. Yep. But as long as you're making the information valuable and actually accurate, then so be it. Um, tools and calculators is a massive one because people, the amount of keyword research we've done over the years, people are regularly searching for a, what size air conditioner do I need?

ARTHUR: That's massive. Yeah. Massive. Cause no one knows.

MICHAEL: I don't know. 13 kilowatt or 17 kilowatt. What's the difference? What's a kilowatt. Exactly. So content around that, like what size air conditioner do I need? The other one is running costs. Especially now. Yep. Energy prices going up. People want to know about that stuff and then maybe savings. So like if you're trying to sell a premium unit that costs more because it's energy efficient. Yep. Can you tie that back to saved electricity? Like the same way people sell solar pretty much.

ARTHUR: Yeah. We did stuff around zoning as well, like a zone calculator, depending on how many bedrooms you have, how many zones. So there's a lot of search volume around all those types of terms. I think the downside to this is you typically need to create some sort of little widget or tool. Not all the time, but I mean, if you're doing a zoning calculator or some sort of calculator, people expect to see a calculator on the page. Yep.

MICHAEL: Which can be hacked together, or I guess if you, in lieu of that, if you don't have the ability to do that, create a table, yeah, a page that explains how to figure it out or rough guides, whatever is within your ability.

ARTHUR: I love a calculator though, I just love going on a site and just putting in numbers and pressing a button and getting the answer. Yeah, that's very true.

MICHAEL: Very satisfying. Worth investing in. The other one is pricing, of course, of course, of course, people always want to know price. And we just see, you know, in search terms reports in Google ads, for example, people searching like 14 kilowatt Fujitsu ducted price. So if you can create content around the different brands and the different power sizes, kilowatt sizes, and then even if you're just giving range, expect to pay between X and X, and then what the variables would be that go into that. And then you can use those pages to convert into sales quotes. So let's figure this out for you. Obligation free quote, give us your details. Now we'll be in touch with the exact pricing and quote for your needs. Lots of traffic out there. The intent may or may not be strong. It could be people at the very start of their research process, or it could be people close to having their wallets out, but you've got to be in it to win it. So build that content out and then use those pages to convert into sales quotes.

ARTHUR: Yeah. They're intense there. They're looking for a price. Yeah. Searching for the price. So they're looking to buy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But yeah, look, not always. It could be somewhat a dreamer that's imagining themselves buying a house one day and just wondering about prices. But I guess once you start talking about size, power sizes and all that, it's very, a bit more specific, isn't it?

ARTHUR: So what about stuff like cheap Fujitsu? Fujitsu. Fujitsu.

MICHAEL: Remember Mark Taylor on the ads? Probably not. No, I do. He's still on the ads. Yeah. Fujitsu. Yeah. I guess if you do it cheap, typically you don't want that. You don't want, I'm well against cheap as a keyword, unless it's exactly what you do. For a cheap air conditioning supplier. Yeah. If you're all about cheap, then yes, but otherwise stay away from it. Cause it just encourages the, what would I want to call them? Rabbits. Well, not, yeah. The painful, the painful inquiries. The ones that are going to take a lot of your time and probably not convert. Um, let's move on. How to's. Always a big one. Yep. These will generally be to try and convert service requests. Yes. So it'd be how to replace filter or how to clean the filter, that sort of stuff. How to service my air conditioning. You can build the content out, teach people how to do it. Maybe make it seem more difficult than it is or more painful than it is and include call outs to get in touch. Hey, we've got this month only free service. And then you go there and upsell them into an ongoing maintenance plan or replacing stuff or whatever it is that- I like the idea of making it harder than it seems.

ARTHUR: So they get in touch. Very deceptive.

MICHAEL: Replacing a filter. Oh, you got to climb up a ladder. It's dangerous.

ARTHUR: You're going to have to- You know what? There'll be so many people out there that wouldn't do it. They'll get a company to do it for them.

MICHAEL: If you can make it, I guess, obvious, like a good offer. Absolutely. Um, well, a lot of people don't have ladders, so yeah, I'll stand on a chair. Don't stand on a chair. You could break your neck. Just give us a call free service kind of thing. Um, I'll let you know what I've been ranting.

ARTHUR: I'll let you read. Oh, you haven't been ranting. It's all been very, very helpful, useful, informative.

MICHAEL: Oh, I hope so. But being that as it may, I'll let you take over for the blog content strategy. Cause I know you've knocked together a few of these in your time.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I have. I have. So this one, I like this one, basically creating a, like a blog content calendar, um, breaking it down into the different seasons and then doing some keyword research around what people are searching for around each different time. because people search for different, I guess, questions and different topics depending on the season. So in summer, you know, how do I get the most out of my air conditioner? You know, it might be a really hot day. Climate in Australia sucks. It can get up to 45 degrees. So air conditioners can struggle and people want to know how to get the most out of it. Likewise, people search for stuff like how, how can I reduce my air conditioning bill? So it's just basically going through doing keyword research and finding what people are searching for and tailoring the content to that. and then creating a calendar and rolling it out. Being consistent. Being consistent, but that content can be evergreen as well because people search for it every year depending on the time, just update it, refresh it, add to it, build on it and it will rank. That's what we've done and it works really well. So we've got content from four or five years ago that we just update every so often, make it better and it continuously like, what are you doing?

MICHAEL: Yawning. I'm not yawning at boredom at this air conditioning blog content chat.

ARTHUR: But basically, yeah, it ranks all year round. And when the time comes for people to search, you get a lot of traffic that way. So we also embed, like you said before, a call to action, depending on what the content is. So if it's content around servicing, there'll be a call to action to book a service. If it's about, you know, if the air conditioner is breaking or whatever, it'll be to request a quote. Or like if your air conditioning system is old, if you want to save money, you know, get an Actron because it's super energy efficient. And that's it. I mean, there's only so much you can write about air conditioning. Eventually you kind of exhaust all the options, but build up a library and build on it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. The average air conditioning dealer has not none of this stuff.

ARTHUR: So you find that sometimes you write the same thing again and again, but it works. And you, you get, like you said, dribs and drabs of leads come through, but it all adds up. It all adds up.

MICHAEL: Let's move on to a local SEO. Now we did a whole episode on local SEO in episode 32. So we won't go into depth. We won't go into this in depth, but every single air conditioning business should have a Google my business profile. It should be verified and completely filled out profile, pick pictures of the office and the team set up the categories, your opening hours, link your website, like every possible field that you can find in the backend, fill it out with stuff, share some posts to it about your business offers, whatever, get some reviews, link to it from your homepage somewhere.

ARTHUR: Are you chucking the location in the title? Typically, yes. So you're Michael's Air Conditioning Services, Wentworthville? Yeah. Sydney or wherever you're from?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. You know what?

ARTHUR: Or you're not?

MICHAEL: I don't know. I don't know these days. It depends on, again, coming back to the business and the service area. If you're just Wentworthville, super local focused, probably start like that. If you're a big established brand, you probably don't need to. No. Yeah. So. Thought I'd ask. Yeah. Good, good question. Episode 32, go listen to that because there's not really air conditioning specific aspects to this. It's just something you need to do. Link building is a big final one.

ARTHUR: Actually you could probably add products to the GMB listing. Yeah, you can. And services.

MICHAEL: Yep. It's an idea. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's just fill out everything. So we've got that on our, we've got products and services and stuff. We have the SEO show, don't we, as a service?

ARTHUR: I think so.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So spam it. Yeah. Just use it as much as possible. Cause. Google favour their own stuff in search results. I'll probably show some of that stuff and just helps for it not to be dormant and GMB is intricately related to your local SEO of your site. So all your suburb pages, all that sort of stuff, the way it all works together is a little bit voodoo magic, but it's better to have a very filled out profile than to not.

ARTHUR: Yep. I would also add to that by creating Bing places and importing the GMB profile from Google to Bing and then just having it there because that way there is a significant, significantly smaller search market share. But if you do get a few customers that way, why not? It's a very minimal effort.

MICHAEL: And we all know that Bing is going to take down Google now that it has chat GPT plugged into it one day.

ARTHUR: Is it chat GPT plugged into it? Is it their own AI? Chat GPT. Oh, they plugged it into. Okay. I thought it was their own AI.

MICHAEL: No, it's their own like version of open AIs. Right. Okay. Um, so link building your favorite topic. It's absolutely since it's almost as exciting as error code pages, like building as a topic. But, um, We've covered a lot of link building in the past, so we're not going to dwell on it today. Go back and listen to them for the basics, but as it pertains to air conditioning companies. Well, first and foremost, you need to be in every single business directory possible. Do the work, spend the time building links in them because help your local SEO. Industry relevant things. So there's all sorts of random websites like amca.com.au, airah.org.au, like industry bodies, get memberships in them. If you don't have memberships, if you do go to those sites and make sure they're linking to you where they do link, uh, hvacrnews.com.au, if you can go reach out and get yourself featured in there, that sort of stuff is gold because it's super relevant for your industry. Reaching out to your suppliers. your partners, you know, other electricians that you might work with or manufacturers that you work with and getting links from them.

ARTHUR: If you've done any jobs for like a business and if you've got them on their site, maybe get a link back.

MICHAEL: Give us a shout out, like in your, in your projects page. Yep. Just link to us. If you're talking about who did the air conditioning. Yeah. That stuff happens all the time in the construction world. Takes time, takes effort, takes consistency, but you'll get some links and that is what powers up all of these suburb pages and error pages and service pages and so on and so forth. Then of course, if you can't be bothered doing it yourself, use an agency or a third party link building service. Use us. Use us. Use someone else. Doesn't matter. But most of this stuff, look, as an air conditioning business owner slash operator, your time is probably not best spent building error code pages. That's why you use SEO agencies. But we wanted to delve into this. We wanted to navigate the Niche.

ARTHUR: Haven't said that in a while. No, I think you only said it twice. Have you even said it once? No. Give it a go. I refuse. Give it a go. Navigate the Niche.

MICHAEL: There we go. So, um, we've navigated the niche today. I feel we've done an industry takedown.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think there's a lot of valuable stuff in there that people can take away from this episode.

MICHAEL: And if you're not in the air conditioning space, you probably left about 25 minutes ago.

ARTHUR: So a lot of the stuff you can apply to different niches, but we'll cover different niches and,

MICHAEL: Yes. So we're planning to do these takedowns. What have we got here in our notes? Uh, florists, lawyers, lawyers, marketing agencies, give away some of our secret sauce and plenty of others to follow. Unless of course this episode gets no downloads and terrible feedback and then we'll forget it ever happened. But, um, time will tell. Time will tell until then. Happy SEOing. Bye bye.

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