<b>The HVAC company hiding in the wrong aisle</b>

<b>The HVAC company hiding in the wrong aisle</b>

Meet an HVAC firm in Phoenix that did furnace repair, AC installs, and emergency call-outs equally. Their Google Business Profile listed one primary category: 'HVAC contractor.' Reasonable. Also a quiet disaster.

In summer, nobody searches 'HVAC contractor.' They search 'AC repair near me' and 'air conditioning service.' Google ranks the map pack category by category, and our client wasn't even entered in the races that mattered.

We kept the primary, then added nine secondary categories: air conditioning repair service, furnace repair service, heating contractor, and so on. Each one is a separate doorway into a separate set of searches.

For two weeks the dashboard looked identical. Categories aren't an overnight lever.

Then the impressions chart fanned out like a hand of cards. They started appearing for 32 query types they'd been locked out of.

Direction requests doubled. Calls rose 47 percent across the cooling season, with zero new reviews and no spend.

The lesson: your primary category picks one fight. Your secondary categories enter you in all the others.