Key takeaways
- HVAC companies should start pre-season website work about eight weeks before their usual first spike in no-cool or no-heat calls.
- Cooling-led markets usually start the checklist in early spring, heating-led markets in late summer or early fall, and mixed markets run it twice.
- The most important pre-season task is testing the phone path end to end, including every tracking number, after-hours routing and a test booking.
- Each season, change only the homepage hero, main offer and banner, while the structure, service pages and city pages stay put.
Peak season doesn't arrive on a set date. It arrives with the first real heat wave or the first night well below freezing, and it brings a flood of no-cool or no-heat calls within days. Whatever is broken on your website, in your booking flow or in your phone routing shows up all at once, when you have the least time to fix it.
This checklist works backward from that first spike. Run it twice a year: in spring before cooling season, and in late summer or early fall before heating season. The dates depend on your market. A Houston or Miami shop runs the cooling version and leans on it hardest. A Buffalo or Pittsburgh shop puts more weight on the fall run. Mixed markets like Philadelphia or Albany need both.
The timeline at a glance
Each item is covered in detail below. Owners are suggestions. In a small shop, one person may hold three of these roles.
| When | Website and marketing | Phones and operations | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 weeks out | Speed check, fix broken pages, plan the seasonal hero and offer, review tune-up and membership pages | Draft the peak CSR schedule and on-call rotation, confirm texting registration | Owner or GM, web partner |
| 4 weeks out | Publish seasonal content, launch the tune-up campaign, update GBP, start the review push, build ad landing pages | Test call tracking on every number, test booking end to end, train CSRs on seasonal scripts | Marketing lead, CSR manager |
| 1 week out | Swap the homepage hero, check LSA and Search budgets, rerun the speed test | Test missed-call text-back and after-hours routing, brief the answering service, load the dispatch board | CSR manager, dispatch |
| Peak week | Check the site and forms daily, pull offers you can't fulfill | Watch answer rate daily, adjust ad budgets to capacity, follow up every missed call | GM, dispatch, CSR lead |
8 weeks out: fix the foundations
Speed and basics
Run your homepage and your top service pages through Google's PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Then test the way your customers do: on a phone, on cellular data, away from the office Wi-Fi. Check that the phone number is tappable, the booking button is visible without scrolling, and nothing jumps around while the page loads. Our free website audit runs a speed test and an HVAC-specific checklist in one pass.
While you are there, click every link in the main menu and the footer. Broken pages, old promotions and expired financing offers pile up over a season when nobody is looking.
Plan the seasonal hero and offer
Decide now what the top of the homepage will say at peak. For cooling, that usually means AC repair and no-cool service up front, with replacement and financing second. For heating, it means furnace and heat pump repair, plus a short safety note about carbon monoxide and gas. Pick one offer per season, not five. A tune-up special or a membership sign-up incentive works well before the rush. During peak, the offer is often just availability, so word it honestly. "Same-day service when the schedule allows" holds up in July. "Always same-day" usually doesn't.
Review tune-up and maintenance agreement pages
Your tune-up page and your maintenance agreement or club membership page do most of their work before the season starts. Check that each one says plainly what's included, how many visits a year, what members get (priority scheduling, repair discounts, waived overtime fees, whatever your plan actually offers), how to sign up online and how renewal works. If membership sign-up still requires a phone call, fix that now. Whatever the page says about pricing should match what your CSRs quote.
Phones and texting
Draft the peak CSR schedule and the on-call rotation now, not in the week the heat arrives. If you text customers from your business number, confirm your A2P 10DLC registration is approved and current. Approval can take a while, and texts from unregistered numbers may be filtered by carriers.
4 weeks out: publish, test and ask
Publish seasonal content and offers
Update the tune-up page, publish the seasonal offer and launch the campaign: email and text to past customers who have opted in, a Google Business Profile post and a banner on the site. Tune-ups booked now fill the schedule before the rush, and they give your techs a chance to spot failing equipment before it fails, which often leads to a replacement conversation on the homeowner's terms.
Update your Google Business Profile
- Confirm regular hours, and add special hours for any holidays in the season.
- Check that the services list includes what you want to sell this season.
- Add recent photos from real installs and repairs.
- Publish a post about the tune-up offer or membership.
- Check the phone number, website link and service areas.
Our Google Business Profile guide for HVAC covers each of these in more depth.
Start the review push
Reviews take time to build, and peak-season searchers compare star ratings and recent reviews quickly. Make sure every completed tune-up and repair triggers a review request by text, sent after the invoice closes, with a direct link to your Google review form. Tools such as Podium, Birdeye and NiceJob handle this, and so do some field service platforms. Ask every customer the same way. Google's policies don't allow incentives for reviews, or asking only the customers you expect to be happy.
Build ad landing pages
If you run Google Search Ads, build a separate landing page for each of the season's main campaigns: AC repair, AC replacement, heat pump installs, furnace repair. Each page should match its ad, show the phone number and booking button at the top, carry local reviews and financing, and load fast on a phone. Our PPC and LSA landing pages service builds exactly these. Local Services Ads have no landing page, so update the LSA profile instead: hours, job types, service area and budget. If you're still deciding between the two, read LSA vs Google Ads for HVAC.
Test call tracking and booking
Call every tracking number you publish: the website, your profile, each ad campaign, and truck or print numbers if you track them. For each one, confirm it rings the right line, the recording works and the call appears in your reporting with the correct source.
Then book a test job through the website the way a customer would. Check that the booking arrives in ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or Jobber with the right details, that the confirmation text and email go out, and that dispatch can see it on the board. Cancel it afterward. Repeat the test for the web form and the membership sign-up.
Train CSRs on seasonal scripts
Walk CSRs through the seasonal offer, the membership pitch, financing, and how to handle "can you come today" when the board is full. Agree what they say when the schedule is booked out, and when to offer the next open slot, a membership or a tune-up instead.
Run the free audit: mobile speed, Core Web Vitals, SEO basics and an HVAC conversion checklist in about a minute.
1 week out: final checks
- Swap the homepage hero to the seasonal message, and update any site-wide banner.
- Run the speed test again. New banners and images often slow a page down.
- Check LSA and Search budgets and schedules, and make sure ads only run during hours your team can answer.
- Test after-hours flows. Call after closing, let it ring out, and check that missed-call text-back arrives, that urgent replies alert the on-call tech, and that the answering service has the current rotation and scripts.
- Load the dispatch board with booked tune-ups, and leave room each day for emergency calls.
- Brief the whole team. Techs, CSRs and dispatch should all know the offer, the membership pitch and the plan for an overflow day.
Peak week: watch, adjust, follow up
When the spike hits, the website mostly needs watching. The phones need everything else.
Check the site daily. Load the homepage and the booking page each morning and submit a test form. Hosting problems and broken forms are easy to miss when everyone is busy, and uptime monitoring on a care plan takes this job off your list.
Check answer rate daily. Your call tracking shows answered and missed calls by source. If the missed share climbs, move people onto the phones, open overflow to your answering service, and make sure every missed call gets a text and a callback.
Match ads to capacity. When the board is full, lower Search budgets on emergency terms, and cap or pause LSA rather than pay for leads you can't serve. When there is room again, open them back up.
Pull offers you can't fulfill. If tune-ups are booked out for weeks, take the tune-up banner down and swap in the membership offer, which promises priority later rather than a slot now.
Follow up every lost lead. Have one CSR spend part of each day calling back missed calls, abandoned bookings and unbooked LSA leads. The homeowner who couldn't get through yesterday may still need help today.
After the season
Within a few weeks of the peak ending, hold a short review while it is fresh. Pull calls, answer rate and call booking rate by source from your call tracking and field service software. List what broke and when it broke. Note which offers booked and which didn't. Put the fixes on the calendar eight weeks before the next season, and the checklist gets shorter every time you run it.