Technical SEO is essential for boosting your HVAC website’s visibility and rankings on Google. Even with great content and strong backlinks, your site won’t perform well without a solid technical foundation. That’s why understanding how to perform a technical SEO audit is key—especially if you’re using an SEO service to grow traffic, generate leads, and improve online visibility.
Start by identifying and fixing crawlability and indexability issues so search engines can properly access your pages. Then, review your site architecture to make sure key service pages are easy to find for both users and search engines. You’ll also want to fix internal linking problems and eliminate duplicate content that could hurt your rankings. After that, assess your site’s speed, mobile responsiveness, and resolve any coding issues that may slow it down. Lastly, ensure your HTTPS is correctly set up, address any error status codes, and conduct a log file analysis to fully understand how search engines are crawling your HVAC website.
13 Steps To Do an HVAC Website Technical SEO Audit
Here’s the step-by-step process you can follow:
1. Spot and Fix Crawlability and Indexability Issues
Crawlability is a term for how easy it is for search engine bots to get to and navigate your HVAC website. This affects whether your pages can be listed in search engine results. If you have problems in either area, potential buyers may not be able to see your site.
First, check to see if your robots.txt file is blocking important pages. Google Search Console lets you check for crawl errors or blocked pages. Check your XML sitemap to ensure it’s up-to-date and includes all your important HVAC service pages. Also, look for pages that have “noindex” tags that they shouldn’t have.
Best Tool: Google Search Console is excellent for identifying crawlability issues. It shows exactly which pages Google can access and which ones have problems.
2. Audit Your Site Architecture
Your site structure should make it easy for visitors and search engines to find information about your HVAC services. Search engines can determine which pages are the most important when there is a clear order.
Check if your key HVAC service categories can be reached with three clicks from your home page. Your URL layout should make sense, and relevant keywords should be used where they make sense. Your navigation menu should be simple, and your key service categories should be easy to see.
Best Tool: The Screaming Frog SEO Spider can crawl your website and create a visual map of its structure, making it easy to spot navigation problems.
3. Fix Internal Linking Issues
Internal links help people and search engines find their way around your HVAC website by connecting pages. Good internal linking increases the authority of each page across your site and keeps people interested.
Look for pages with no internal links (orphan pages). Ensure three or more internal links lead to your most important HVAC service pages. You should use detailed anchor text instead of simple “click here” links. Internal links that don’t work and lead to error pages should be fixed.
Best Tool: Ahrefs Site Audit can identify pages with few internal links and suggest improvement opportunities.
4. Spot and Fix Duplicate Content Issues
Search engines don’t know which version to index and rank when a page contains duplicate information. This happens frequently on HVAC websites, where service pages are very similar in different places.
Check your site for pages that are the same or very similar. Look for title tags and meta descriptions that are already being used. Consider using canonical tags to let search engines know which version of a page is the main one. For pages specific to a place, ensure each one has information about that place’s HVAC needs.
Best Tool: Siteliner can quickly identify duplicate content across your website.
5. Audit Your Site Performance
Page speed directly impacts search rankings and user experience. HVAC companies’ websites that take a long time to load can lose buyers before they even see their services.
Check how long it takes for your page to load on computers and phones. Find large files that need to be compressed. Don’t use too much JavaScript and CSS. Turn on browser caching to make repeat trips go faster. Focus on optimizing your mobile page speed instead of relying on technologies like AMP, which are no longer necessary for most websites.
Best Tool: Google PageSpeed Insights provides performance scores and specific recommendations for improvement.
6. Discover Mobile-Friendliness Issues
Google mostly ranks sites based on their mobile versions, where more than half of all searches happen. Your website for HVAC needs to work great on phones.
Use a responsive design to ensure your site can adapt to different screen sizes. You should be able to read the words without zooming in or out. Make sure that the links and buttons are big enough to tap quickly. Also, make sure that forms, like those for service requests, work well on phones.
Best Tool: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test gives a clear yes/no verdict and screenshots of your site’s mobile appearance.
7. Spot and Fix Code Issues
Search engines can better understand your HVAC website if the code is clean and works well. Clean code also speeds up loading times. Code issues can create barriers to proper indexing.
Best Tool: W3C Markup Validation Service checks your HTML for coding errors.
8. Check HTML and Headings
Check for errors in your HTML code that might confuse search engines. Use a clear and logical heading structure (H1, H2, H3, etc.), starting with a single H1 per page. This helps both SEO and user experience.
Best Tool: SEO Meta in 1 Click extension makes it easy to check your page’s heading tags
9. Optimize Schema and Alt Text
Make sure your schema markup accurately represents your HVAC business and services. Add descriptive alt text to images to help search engines understand your visuals and improve accessibility.
Best Tool: Schema validator can check if your page’s structured data is properly implemented and error-free.
10. Check for and Fix HTTPS Issues
Secure sites not only keep user information safe, but Google also boosts their ranking. Websites for HVAC companies that collect customer information through forms need to be extra careful about security.
Ensure that HTTPS is used on your whole site, not just some of it. Look for mixed content warnings when safe pages load unsafe files. Check to see if your SSL certificate is still good and up to date. Set up proper redirects from HTTP to HTTPS to avoid broken links.
Best Tool: SSL Server Test by Qualys SSL Labs provides a comprehensive security assessment of your website’s HTTPS implementation.
11. Find and Fix Problematic Status Codes
These codes tell computers and search engines how to handle page requests. Incorrect status codes can prevent pages from indexing properly and lead to poor user experiences due to errors like 404s.
Find any 404 mistakes (page not found) and fix them, especially on pages that may have backlinks. See if any 301 redirects lead to other redirects. These are called return chains. Check for 5XX server errors, meaning there are server issues. For important pages, make sure they return an OK (200) code.
Best Tool: Screaming Frog SEO Spider can crawl your entire site and generate a report of all status codes.
12. Perform Log File Analysis
Logs from your server show how search engines use your HVAC website, giving you information that other tools don’t.
Look at which pages search engines crawl most often and which ones they don’t go to very often. Check to see how often important pages are being crawled. Look for trends in how the bot acts, which could mean problems. Identify pages that consume excessive server resources.
Best Tool: Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer is specifically designed for SEO log analysis and provides a clear visualization of crawler activity.
13. Website Backlink Audit
A backlink audit checks the number and quality of websites that link to your HVAC page. Search engines know your website is reliable if it has strong backlinks from other trustworthy websites.
Start by gathering a full list of your backlinks. Find links from spammy or useless sites that could hurt your rankings. Look for chances to get new links from suppliers, industry groups, and local business websites. Check to see if your rivals have backlinks that you could also get.
Best Tool: SEMrush’s Backlink Audit Tool automatically categorizes your backlinks by quality and identifies potentially harmful ones.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process that must be checked and improved regularly. To improve your HVAC website’s performance and get more customers, you must perform a technical SEO audit for HVAC website consistently. Focus on spotting and fixing crawlability and indexability issues, auditing your site architecture, fixing internal linking problems, and resolving duplicate content issues.
Don’t forget to analyze your site performance, discover mobile-friendliness problems, and fix code-related issues that can hurt your SEO. It’s also crucial to check for HTTPS issues, fix problematic status codes, and perform log file analysis to optimize how search engines interact with your site fully. If you’re looking for professional help with your HVAC website’s technical SEO, Wolford Marketing is ready to help.