Pinnacle Air Control is an HVAC company in South Hill, Washington — serving Puyallup, Bonney Lake, and the broader Pierce County area.
When they came to me in 2024, the business was solid: real licensed work, growing client list, strong reputation in the area. The website was the problem. A WordPress template site, slow on mobile, with an average Google rank around 70 across their core service queries. They were getting maybe one new client every three months from the site itself.
Four months after the rebuild, their average Google rank was 18.6 — and 9.4 in a recent week. They're appearing in Google's AI Overview for "heating repair south hill." FAQ rich snippets visible. Over a dozen new clients in the first three months post-launch.
Here's exactly what changed.
Starting state: what was wrong
The WordPress site had the usual problems of a template build:
- Mobile load time over 5 seconds on a 4G connection
- Generic homepage copy that could have applied to any HVAC company in any state
- No FAQ content, no schema, no structured-data anywhere
- Service pages that were thin and identical except for the service name
- Google Business Profile underutilized — wrong primary category, no photos, no posts, stale review velocity
- No location-specific landing pages
The site existed. It just wasn't doing any work.
The rebuild plan
We agreed on a custom build (Next.js, Tailwind, Netlify) instead of another WordPress refresh. Three reasons:
- 1.WordPress was holding the speed back. Page builders bloat the JavaScript bundle and tank Core Web Vitals. A custom build gets to ship a clean, fast, server-rendered HTML payload from the start.
- 1.The SEO foundation had to be built in from the ground up — server-rendered HTML, semantic markup, schema.org structured data, proper heading hierarchy. Bolting that onto an existing WordPress theme is harder than building it correctly from scratch.
- 1.Maintenance becomes simpler when there's no plugin layer to babysit. Updates ship through git, not through a chain of plugins each potentially breaking the others.
The structural moves that mattered most
Location landing pages. Dedicated pages for South Hill, Puyallup, Bonney Lake, and Sumner — each with neighborhood-specific content, not just city-name substitutions. South Hill homeowners searching "HVAC repair south hill" hit a page actually about South Hill HVAC, not a generic Puyallup page with "South Hill" in the H1.
FAQ schema designed for AI extraction. Five to seven questions on the homepage and on each service page, wrapped in FAQPage schema. The questions were real customer questions — the ones Dennis (the owner) said came up on phone calls. The answers were direct and complete in plain language.
Content cluster around HVAC-specific intent. Monthly articles answering specific homeowner questions — "why is my heater short-cycling," "how often should I replace my HVAC filter in South Hill," seasonal AC tune-up reminders. Each article internally linked to the relevant service page and location page.
Google Business Profile rebuild. New primary category (Heating Contractor). Service area listing every city. New photos every two weeks. Posts on a regular cadence. Pre-populated Q&A. Review-generation plan: send the direct Google review link to every completed job inside 24 hours.
NAP and citation cleanup. Identical Name / Address / Phone across Google, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angi, and HomeAdvisor. The inconsistencies that had accumulated were quietly hurting local authority.
The four-month trajectory
Month 1–2: site launched, foundational SEO and GBP work shipped, citation cleanup completed. Search Console showed no obvious change — that's normal. Foundation work pays off after the indexing catches up.
Month 3: first ranking shifts visible. Average rank dropped from ~70 to ~40 across tracked queries. First FAQ rich snippets visible.
Month 4: rank dropped to ~18.6. Page-one rankings for several South Hill HVAC service queries. AI Overview appearance for "heating repair south hill." Over a dozen new clients in the first three months post-launch.
Recent week: average rank 9.4.
What didn't work
A few things I tried that didn't move the needle:
Generic blog posts. Early articles that targeted broad keywords ("benefits of regular HVAC maintenance") didn't rank and didn't generate traffic. The articles that worked were specific: "why your heater is short-cycling," "how often to replace your HVAC filter in South Hill." Specificity beats breadth.
Excessive internal linking. I over-linked early on, with five or six internal links in a 1,200-word article. Bringing that down to two or three high-relevance links per article was cleaner.
Targeting too many cities at once. I initially built landing pages for every city in Pierce County. The thin ones (cities Pinnacle didn't actually serve much) hurt overall authority. We consolidated to the four cities where real work was happening and the rankings improved.
What's different about how the site converts
Beyond rankings, the rebuilt site converts better. Specific design moves:
- Phone number is a tel: link in the header on every page, visible without scrolling
- Service pages have a clear "what this costs" range up front, not buried
- Forms are short — name, phone, brief description — and post directly to email
- Real photos of completed jobs in South Hill, not stock HVAC imagery
- Specific local mentions — Meridian Ave E, 160th St E, South Hill Mall — that signal "we actually work here"
Dennis on the result
> "ChegTech was the best fit for my business. Took every detail into consideration, and helped me turn my vision into a reality. I dreaded the thought of needing to get a website built for my HVAC business, and between the hundreds of spam calls and pushy sales reps, I took the time to research and call a few web designers. ChegTech was the perfect fit. Not only are they local to me, but they made sure everything was done to my satisfaction."
Why this is replicable
Nothing in the Pinnacle rebuild was secret or proprietary. Every move was a well-known SEO and AEO fundamental, executed deliberately and consistently. The reason most local service businesses don't see this kind of ranking lift isn't that they can't — it's that they're not doing the fundamentals.
The rebuild itself is what I now offer as website redesign. The ongoing cadence — monthly articles, GBP posts, photos, reviews — runs under monthly content. The full breakdown of how I approach this category specifically lives on the HVAC web design page.
The pattern transfers cleanly to plumbing, electrical, roofing, glass, contracting, and other home-service trades. Read the IGo Green case study → for a different version of the same playbook, or jump straight to HVAC web design →.