HVAC marketing strategies for your next busy season

Searches tell us when people looked for HVAC work, but they don't show what anyone booked. We look at searches near you alongside your booked repairs, installations and maintenance visits before deciding where your ad money should go.

Which HVAC marketing strategies should you prioritize?

Prioritize SEO, Google Ads, Local Services Ads, and email and text messages to past customers. Match your spending to the repairs, installations, and maintenance visits your crew can still take. Adjust that spending based on which channels led to jobs that actually got booked.

600,000 400,000 200,000 0

Furnace repair peak: January, 450,000

AC repair peak: July, 673,000

OctO NovN DecD JanJ FebF MarM AprA MayM JunJ JulJ AugA SepS

Monthly furnace repair and AC repair searches, October 2025 through September 2026

Month	Furnace repair	AC repair
October 2025	301,000	368,000
November 2025	301,000	201,000
December 2025	368,000	165,000
January 2026	450,000	201,000
February 2026	301,000	201,000
March 2026	165,000	301,000
April 2026	110,000	246,000
May 2026	74,000	450,000
June 2026	60,500	450,000
July 2026	110,000	673,000
August 2026	90,500	550,000
September 2026	60,500	450,000

These figures cover just one year, so an unusual month or winter could throw off the pattern. We build on these numbers by pulling monthly searches for your own service area and checking the usual heating and cooling seasons where you work. We also look at which calls and inquiries turned into booked repairs, accepted replacements and plan signups. Our advice comes from that fuller picture, and it's how we decide where your marketing money should go.

Heating repair searches reached their peak of 74,000 in October 2025, three months before furnace repair. Before putting those ads on the same calendar, we check whether people near you search for them in different months too.

Furnace and AC tune-up searches peak in different months

Furnace tune-up searches peaked three months before furnace repair, but AC tune-ups reached their peak alongside AC repairs. October also had nearly twice as many furnace tune-up searches as January, the next busiest month, so furnace reminders and AC reminders get separate dates.

If the same pattern shows up near you, your furnace maintenance page and customer reminders need to be ready before October. Searches for furnace maintenance kept rising into January, though, so we check that phrase before deciding when to stop advertising heating maintenance for the season.

AC tune-up searches climbed through spring and reached their peak in July, along with AC repair and AC maintenance. Even if you've sent your customer reminders earlier, keep your AC tune-up page available through summer so people can still find it.

Homeowners are told to have their AC checked in spring and their heating checked in fall, before contractors get busy. If you have tune-up appointments open in spring, we start with an email or text to past customers and judge the response by the visits they book.

Your installation crew may have openings even when you can't take another repair call. We give replacement ads a budget of their own so we can raise or lower that spending based on the installations you can still book.

After a repair visit, your follow-up is another chance to explain the plan. We time email and text reminders around the season and each customer's renewal date. Remarketing is another great way to reach people who've already visited your site.

Phoenix has a longer cooling season than Minneapolis

A Phoenix shop may need AC ads running for longer than a Minneapolis shop because the cooling season lasts longer there. We look at the weather where you work and when people nearby begin searching for AC or heating repairs to work out when your ads should start and stop.

In Atlanta, we check searches for both heating and cooling work before treating either season as slow.

By March, Phoenix AC repair searches were already more than three times their December low. Furnace repair searches peaked earlier there than they did nationally, while AC tune-up searches peaked later, so a national calendar alone wouldn't tell you when to start or finish your ads.

November planning for HVAC companies in colder areas

Paid ads can be up and running quickly, but we allow months for your website to become more visible in search. We give Business Profile work the same head start, which means preparing for next summer's AC work while your winter ads are running.

Unless your rankings and booked jobs point us another way, we use ads to bring in furnace calls this winter and put most new HVAC SEO work into your AC pages for next summer.

If there's a problem on a heating page, we fix it now and put the rest of your heating SEO on the calendar for spring and summer. You may be busy with AC work then, but your heating pages still need to be ready for next fall's tune-up searches.

Phoenix needs an earlier start because AC repair searches rose in spring. We begin work on cooling pages and the Business Profile in November, then review maintenance bookings to decide when to send spring reminders.

Repair calls can use up the budget for other work

When repair calls pick up, their ads can spend money you'd meant to use for replacements or spring AC tune-ups. Giving each its own budget beforehand lets us adjust spending to match the jobs you still have room to book.

If your repair schedule is full but you have room for installations, we'd reduce repair ads and keep replacement ads running. If you have open appointments, we'd check which services need more bookings and what people in your area are searching for before increasing your budget.

A forecast cold snap or heat wave might be a reason to adjust Google's automatic bidding for a short time, but only if we expect people who interact with your ads to be much more or less likely to call or fill out a form. More searches on their own wouldn't be enough.

Note: Google's seasonality adjustments tell Smart Bidding, a type of automatic bidding, to expect a change in conversion rate, meaning conversions such as calls or form submissions per ad interaction. Google recommends them only for major changes because Smart Bidding already handles seasonal events. They work best for events lasting 1 to 7 days and may work less well beyond 14 days.

For Search campaigns, they're available with Target CPA (target cost per action) or Target ROAS (target return on ad spend). Performance Max can use them with any bid strategy. Google names promotions and sales, and we'd also consider weather under the conditions above.

You can still be charged for a call nobody answers. As Local Services Ads move into Google Ads, that can happen when the call comes during both your ad schedule and your Business Profile hours and the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. Phone menus have a separate rule, and our article on the Local Services Ads move explains the details.

A month-by-month HVAC marketing plan

The booking percentages below show what the schedule might look like for an HVAC company in a colder area as it plans for heating and AC work.

March and April have the largest share of appointments still open here, while January and July have the smallest. With that much room in spring, we start by asking past customers to book tune-ups and check installation openings separately before setting the replacement ad budget.

The booked percentages refer to the share of available service appointments filled each month. The last column gives our recommendations for when each month comes around again, based on the openings shown.

How we'd build a calendar for your company

Your calendar needs to reflect when the weather changes where you work and the jobs you're already committed to. We review monthly searches for your area for repairs, replacements, tune-ups and maintenance plans separately, because a busy month for one doesn't necessarily mean a busy month for the others.

Those searches help us choose when to run ads, but we need to know which inquiries turned into booked jobs before deciding what to spend next. We track repairs, accepted replacement estimates and plan signups separately so your budget follows the work you've actually booked, even when the search figures suggest something different. If more people are searching but your calls aren't picking up, we investigate that gap before changing the plan.

Working with JAWC on your HVAC marketing

At JAWC, we build websites for HVAC companies and help with local SEO and Google Ads. Before recommending more ad spending, we look at which jobs you can still take on. Your repair schedule may be full while you still have room for installations.

Each month, you'll see repairs, replacements and maintenance plan signups reported separately, with a comparison to where you started. Those results tell us what to change before your next heating or cooling season.

Those numbers guide where we put your marketing budget and what we recommend next. We build your strategy around the jobs you want, then use the results to decide where to invest more and where to change course. That’s the approach behind our 5.0 on Google. We’d like to earn your business and bring that same discipline to your HVAC marketing.

Request your free visibility report