An HVAC Business, Four Months After Its First Website

Twenty people visited the site last week. They viewed thirty pages, and three of them filled out the contact form. Google Search Console showed 123 impressions and 4 clicks, and the Google Business Profile picked up 12 interactions, 11 website clicks, and 1 phone call.

None of those numbers is large. Four months ago, every one of them was zero.

This is an HVAC business in Tennessee that launched with no website at all. The owners had spent over twenty years in the trade working for other companies before it was their name on the truck.

What an ordinary week looks like

I like showing a plain week because it’s easier to trust than a best-case screenshot. A small local business doesn’t have thousands of visitors. It has a few dozen people, a few form fills, and a phone that rings once, and for a company that did nothing online last spring, that’s the whole system starting to work.

Three form fills from twenty visitors is the number I’d point to first. Out of that small group, a meaningful share asked to be contacted, which is what you’d expect when the site is built around what a homeowner with a broken system wants to do.

What the report surfaced

The weekly report showed two things the owners didn’t know before. First, organic and direct traffic are nearly identical, and most of it arrives on mobile. That confirms the site has to work on a phone first, since that’s where nearly everyone is looking. Second, Facebook referrals have been strong enough on their own that we’re starting a paid Facebook campaign to build on it.

Neither of those findings was something the owners could have guessed from the phone ringing.

They only show up once there’s a report to read, which is most of the reason I build one for every client.

The part I didn’t plan for

What took longer than expected wasn’t the traffic. It was the phone. Once the Google Business Profile I’d set up went live, the owners started getting spam calls from companies offering to help them “claim” a profile that was already claimed and running.

Fixing that meant changing their Google Voice filtering, not their marketing. That was a good reminder that part of the work is the unglamorous stuff around the edges of the system. Now when the phone rings, it’s a real customer and not a pitch, which matters more to a small trade business than any impressions chart.

If you’ve never had a way to see your own numbers, the first report is a strange experience. Everything on it is new information, and some of it changes what you do next. I’m still curious how much of that Facebook traffic will turn into booked jobs once the paid campaign starts, and I don’t have an answer yet. The next few weeks of reports will say.

What would you want to know about your own numbers if you’d never had a way to see them before?