HVAC Local SEO Case Study: Summit Air and Heating, Austin TX — 14 to 47 GBP Calls in 60 Days

Summit Air and Heating ranked well from their own shop and almost nowhere else. Ninety days on the Rank package changed where they showed up, who answered the phone, and whether AI search recommended them at all.

Summit Air and Heating · Austin, TX · HVAC

01 / The challenge

Where Summit Air and Heating started

Summit Air and Heating had operated in Austin, Texas for 12 years with 80 five-star reviews and a complete Google Business Profile, yet ranked outside the top 10 for every major HVAC keyword in their city. The problem was not their reputation. Their GBP primary category, service area, and photo strategy were working against them.

Summit Air and Heating had operated in Austin, Texas for 12 years with 80 five-star reviews and a complete Google Business Profile, yet ranked outside the top 10 for every major HVAC keyword in their city. They ranked in the map pack only within about two miles of their shop — the rest of Austin never saw them. They were not named in a single AI Overview or ChatGPT answer for "best HVAC near Austin." Missed calls during jobs went to a voicemail nobody checked until the next morning, and a 4.6 rating grew by luck, not by system, with new reviews arriving once or twice a month. The baseline number that mattered: 14 inbound calls a month from search.

02 / What we did

The plan we ran

A GBP audit found Summit Air and Heating's primary category set to Air Conditioning Contractor instead of HVAC Contractor, a category with four times the search volume — correcting it was the first change made in week one. Their service area was reconfigured across all 12 target zip codes, making the profile eligible to rank metro-wide. They had uploaded only 4 photos in the past year; Homerankr uploaded 40 geo-tagged job-site photos across all 12 service zip codes, and started a weekly GBP post cadence alternating cooling and heating topics. FAQ and HowTo schema were built so Google's AI and ChatGPT could quote Summit cleanly, alongside LLM citations on the sources those engines actually read. Missed call text-back went live within 60 seconds, with two-touch review requests after every job and a follow-up pipeline so no lead sat in a voicemail overnight again.

03 / The levers

Levers pulled, in order.

04 / The results

What it produced

Map pack engineering moved Summit Air and Heating from outside the top 10 to the top 5 for their city within 45 days, then into the local 3-pack for 8 of 12 target zip codes by day 60. GBP calls climbed from a 14-per-month baseline to 47 per month over the same 60-day window, with zero ad spend involved.