For air conditioning businesses starting this in December
Decided months before the heatwave, and two markets in one business.
A report on your business, showing where you appear across your area now, before the season decides it for you.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
5 minutes
He was able to take our rough ideas, from concept through to reality. The site has provided an influx of new members, helping to keep our club viable.
A passion-driven, good-hearted and reliable service provider with the competency of a genius when it comes to software engineering, AI technology and marketing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
An air conditioning business earns most of its year in about six weeks, and its position in the search results on the first hot day was decided months earlier.
This is why the timing of the work matters more than the effort in this trade, what people actually search when it gets hot, and what moves it.
When the first heatwave arrives, searching triples and everybody in the trade is flat out. Nothing done in that fortnight changes where the business appears, because local rankings move over months, not days.
So the position on that day is a result of work done in autumn or winter, which is when the phone is quiet, the crews have capacity and nobody feels like spending money on marketing.
This is the single most consequential piece of timing in the trade and almost everybody gets it wrong. The businesses that dominate a heatwave are the ones that did the boring work in July.
It applies to the reviews too. A profile with nothing recent when the hot week arrives looks dormant to the person searching, and reviews take months to accumulate.
Somebody whose unit has died today searches urgently, close by, and picks fast. Somebody planning an install researches for weeks, compares brands, reads about sizing and ducted versus split, and travels further.
They need different things from a business and most air conditioning websites serve neither properly, because they have one page that mentions both and a phone number.
The install searches are the valuable ones and the ones a business can actually win with writing. Questions about sizing a room, ducted versus split, running costs, and what a system should actually cost are searched constantly and answered badly.
The repair searches are won on proximity, hours and reviews rather than on content, which means they are won on the listing rather than on the website.
In a heatwave, the businesses that appear are close, open, and reviewed recently. Two of those three are settings in a listing that most businesses have not touched since they created it.
Hours are the one that costs the most and is noticed the least. A business showing as closed at four in the afternoon on the hottest day of the year is being filtered out of the results by its own listing.
Emergency and after-hours availability is a real differentiator if it is stated properly, and invisible if it is only mentioned on a website page nobody reaches.
The services list is the other one. Every brand you are accredited for, every system type you install, and every service you offer is a search you can appear for, and most listings name none of them.
Searches for commercial air conditioning, ducted systems for offices, mechanical services and maintenance contracts get a fraction of the volume of domestic searches, and they are worth many times more per enquiry.
They are also far less contested, because most air conditioning businesses market entirely to homeowners and the ones that do commercial rely on relationships rather than search.
The buyer is different in a way the writing has to reflect. A building manager or a fitout project manager is reading for capability, insurance, compliance and whether you can maintain the thing afterwards, not for a special offer.
For a business with any commercial capability at all, this is usually the highest-return page it can write, and it takes one page rather than a campaign.
The listing gets completed properly and early, the website gets the install questions answered honestly, the reviews get asked for automatically, and it is all measured from a grid across the area before the season starts.
Order matters more here than in any other trade because of the calendar. Listing and reviews in autumn, writing through winter, so that the spring re-measurement shows where the business will stand when it gets hot.
The writing should answer the questions rather than sell. What size system a room needs, what ducted actually costs, why a cheap install fails in three years. Those pages get read for months and they get read by people about to spend four figures.
Then the measurement happens twice: once when the work starts and once before the season, so the difference is a fact rather than a feeling.
If you do one thing after reading this, check what hours your listing says you keep, and whether they match what you actually do in summer. That one field is quietly filtering you out of the busiest fortnight of your year.
Related reading from us: local SEO for plumbers, Local SEO For Landscapers, Google Reviews For HVAC Contractors and missed call text back for HVAC contractors.
In autumn or winter. Local rankings move over months, so the position you hold in a heatwave was decided long before it.
The install questions: sizing, ducted versus split, running costs, and what a system should actually cost. They are searched constantly and answered badly.
Usually it is the best page a business with any commercial capability can write. Low volume, high value, and very little competition.
Weeks. It is the fastest and cheapest change available, and most listings in this trade are close to empty.