I copied Alex Fromzy's home service marketing strategy and made an HVAC company 1.27 million in just 90 days. Here's exactly what I did. So, here's the HVAC company's service titan dashboard. I'm just going to refresh the page here and it loads the same numbers.
You can see 1.27 million in the last 90 days or the last quarter from this Alex Hermozi home service marketing strategy. Almost all of it was tied to the search and paid traffic that we drove. Just 7 months before the dashboard looked like this, the owner of this HVAC company called me, ready to cut his entire ad budget. He was invisible on Google search. He couldn't crack the map pack in his own city. His Google ads were bumping over $600 per lead.
For context, that's catastrophic on a residential service call. Two more bad quarters and the whole channel was getting shut off. So, we rebuilt his marketing strategy around two principles that Hormosi drills into every operator he talks to. Number one, fix the offer before you scale the leads. For a home service business, the offer is actually the website experience. And number two, stop optimizing for cost per lead. Instead, optimize for LTV to CAC ratio. Once that math makes sense, you can actually spend more than your competitors on every single click and still print money. So, there's three sections in this video.
The first is the Hermosi frame, the four lanes every business uses to get customers, and the two that actually matter for home service. Number two, and the biggest section by far, exactly how I rank a contractor or home service business on Google Maps and inside of AI search. This is where most of that 1.27 million came from. And finally, the third is how I rebuilt their Google ads around LTV to CAC ratio instead of cost per lead. If you're running a home service business doing over 1.5 million a year, this video is built for you. Anyone else? Just close the tab. Let's get into it. So, Hermoszi has a frame in $100 million leads called the core four.
Every business on Earth gets customers four main ways. Just four. That's it. The whole game is figuring out which of the four is your unfair advantage and dumping disproportionate effort there. For a home service company, two of the four are where 95% of your marketing leverage lives. The other two are real, but they're not really where most of your time and dollars should actually sit. So, here's the frame.
The four lanes that Hermosi names are post-free content, run paid ads, warm outreach, and cold outreach. For home service, post-f free content doesn't necessarily mean social media or blog posts or reels. It also means local SEO, Google business profile, maps, and AI search. For home service, paid ads means Google local service ads. It can mean search ads or pay-per-click as well as meta ads and YouTube ads. For warm outreach, it can mean database reactivation. It can mean B2B partnerships with realators and other contractors. It can also mean past customer phone calls. It's a real lever, but it lives in kind of the sales and ops land. Not what we're covering today.
And then finally, cold outreach, so doornocking or cold calling. Some businesses do scale on it, like pest control and roofing, but not where most marketing dollars should actually go to for most home service businesses. So, in this video, I'll be covering the free content and the paid ads, which I would say are about 50/50 in terms of the home service leverage. The reason that most home service companies plateau at about a million to a million five in revenue and stall is they're running one of these two lanes badly and ignoring the other one entirely. The next 20 minutes is how to run both at scale.
We start with the offer because Hormos's whole point is that scaling traffic into a broken offer is the fastest way to go broke. Before any traffic, let's talk about the website. 99.2% of home service websites sit at under 1% conversion rate. If you fall into that category, the rest of this video is wasted because you're paying retail to lose customers. So, Hormosi has a framework in $100 million offers called the value equation. Most home service companies only run the top half of it. So, reviews, before and afters, guarantees, but the compounding wins are actually on the bottom half of it, and almost nobody runs them deliberately.
So, the equation is pretty simple. It's that the value equals the dream outcome times the perceived likelihood of actually hitting that outcome divided by the time delay times the effort and sacrifice. So the dream outcome actually comes down to the H1 header and the hero copy of your website. So something like HVAC services in city is a category but cool era 90 minutes same day service flat rate pricing is an outcome. The same audience completely different conversion rate. So perceived likelihood is typically on the reviews on the homepage, before and after photos, naming the owner, naming guarantees. This section is also called reassurances.
And this is where you avoid disqualifying yourself and actually train the user to trust you enough to call you. Next is time delay killers. So things that kill the time delay, which is crucial for home services. You've probably heard speed to lead is everything. You need to have speed in your sales process, and it's totally true. Couple options are instant estimate calculators online, online booking with calendar visibility. So if you're an HVAC or plumbing company and you're on Service Titan, booking availability on the site is huge.
Having a same day or even like 90minute window dispatch promises is huge as well as emergency and after hours visibility on the homepage. And then of course from any leads that come in via phone call, the website, website form, online scheduling, that should all be dealt with as soon as possible from your sales team. And then on the front of effort killers, which are things that literally help your customers convert better and eliminate this bottom half of the equation, which is good, having things like a sticky mobile header with a call, quote, chat, schedule online that scrolls as the user scrolls with them. Having a pricing transparency page with ranges can actually help.
Having address autocomplete on forms can be massive for helping people just fill out the forms quicker and increase the conversion rate. having a photo upload from the phone. So, people can actually upload a photo of the issue they're having. If you have a visual service, let's say you're in water damage restoration, and people can upload a photo of the massive flooded basement that they have um to give you a sense of kind of the actual quote. And then having pricing guides as text or email follow-ups just so they can kind of understand what they're getting. So, the goal at the top of the equation is to drive the value of your service up.
So, having more reviews, better testimonials, before and after photos scattered all over the website. also having named guarantees, certifications, having an owner bio as well as just any reassurances like licensed and insured, 100% satisfaction guarantee, etc. And the thing is most contractors or home service businesses only work on this top half of the equation. But the bottom half of the equation actually drives friction down. Um, which is super super crucial and that is what we talked about up here, which is the time delay killers and the effort killers. So this is where the compounding wins actually lie. Of course, you need the top half of of the equation dialed in.
And this visual just shows if you're able to get your home service website to convert at four to 5%, you can get over three times the number of leads that you're getting from the same exact traffic, the same ad spend, you literally just have a better converting website. 3 to five times more revenue out of the same traffic before you change a single thing about SEO or ads. That's also the reason why this section comes before the SEO section. If you go to the next section pumped up about ranking on maps or AI search or improving your search ads, but you skip the offer step or the website, you're funneling more traffic into a website that converts under 1%.
The website fix is the prerequisite and you need to do it. Now, we go drive traffic into it. Step number two, show up where your customers are already searching. There are really three places on Google where a home service business needs to show up. Three, that's it. Most contractors get visible in one of the three and then kind of call it good. But that's the reason this strategy works is because most of your competitors are just leaving two or three of these lanes wide open. I'm going to walk you through all three. The first is the map pack. Next is AI mode and chatbt search. And then finally, organic or SER.
By the end of this section, you'll know exactly what it takes to dominate a Google search results page in your city and why showing up three times on the same page beats showing up just once. So, here's what a real Google search looks like for an HVAC query in a real city. So, this is kind of that free content lane, but applied to the home service industry. So, if I'm a homeowner and searching for HVAC near me, there are three sections of search results that I need to be concerned with. The first is Google's AI overview. Sometimes also, it shows Google's AI mode. The next is Google's map pack or local pack, otherwise known as the threeack. It usually shows one sponsored business and then three organic results for your search. And then the third section is just typical organic search, otherwise known as SER, SE RP. This is just the website results. So there's quite a few factors that actually dictate how you rank in Google's map pack. The first is relevance.
The next is proximity. And then the third is trust or reputation. So relevance, the biggest cheat code that we have is actually a name match. So, if your company name is just Smith Brothers on your Google business profile and someone's searching for an HVAC company near me, even if you have 10,000 reviews and you have, you know, perfect primary category and you have all these awesome photos, a company called Smith HVAC is going to outrank you simply because they have a keyword that was in that search. The biggest lever ahead of anything else, including reviews, backlinks, website, etc., is to have an exact match Google business profile name.
This process is pretty unique and it involves getting a doing business as or DBA for your company. You do not want to mess this up because you can get suspended. I made a video on exactly how to do this whole exact match name process. Check it out right here. So, aside from the Google business profile name, there's this little checklist I put together. So, we have the primary category set to the exact match trade. So, obviously, if you're an HVAC company and your primary category is HVAC contractor, that's good. But if you really want to rank for AC repair searches, you want to make your primary category air conditioning repair service and have HVAC contractor as a secondary category. Um, so you also want to list all the other relevant secondary categories. For an HVAC company, that'll be, you know, furnace repair, that'll be heating contractor, um, etc., etc.
The next is that exact match name that we talked about. The next is a really good service description for every single service. So on the Google business profile, you can actually go through and add services for every single service you offer and keywordri descriptions for every service. The next, which isn't actually included in here, but totally should be, is adding all your services as products. So on Google business profile, there's this product section that a lot of companies don't use, and you can literally put your services as products, and it gives language models structured data to pull from in order to rank you higher. The next is geotagged photos uploaded weekly. I recommend having all your texts on the field, taking photos of every single job, and then just uploading them into a Google Drive folder and putting those on the Google Business Profile every single week.
The next is Google Business Profile Post. So, this is the updates section on your Google business profile. It's not a direct ranking factor, but what you can do is actually publish weekly content with either offers um or just descriptions of your services and then use the learn more button to internally link back to your website pages in order to help those website pages stay indexed and rank higher. And then the final and biggest factor here is review velocity. So review velocity and just total reviews is of utmost importance in order to rank and be trusted by Google search results.
So as you can see, reviews are a huge part of teaching Google that you're a trustworthy company. And this is exactly how we do that. Real quick, if you run a home service company doing over 1.5 million a year and you want our help to get you more phone calls and book jobs from Google Search, book a free consultation with us at the first link in the description below. But first, back to the video. So this is the review velocity flow that we use for all of our clients. Typically it can get 15 to 30 reviews a month. So step one is your tech completes a job. Step two is before leaving the tech asks in person, not later by text or email or SMS.
And this is probably the most important step. This is where a lot of companies miss out on it. They think, "Oh, it's just easier to send them a text." You can even have the tech mention that they're going to text you the link. Nobody will respond to that text. You are not getting the review. So step number three to make it more simple is the tech can hand the customer a QR code that you've printed out that links directly to the Google review page. All they have to do is just whip out their phone, scan it, and then leave a review. So you can just train your text on a super simple script like, "Hey, if you were happy with the work today, it would mean a lot if you left me a review. Would you mind just scanning this Q quick QR code? It just takes 20 seconds." Step five is that customer does scan and leave the review. So if they do, awesome.
Pay the tech 25 bucks. pay them 50 bucks. You know, we work with some companies that pay them $300 per review, depending on the nature of of the of the business, of course. But if they don't leave that review, hit them with a follow-up via SMS or Blue Text, even better. Um, about 12 hours after the job, and then an email after 24 hours if there's still no review. If there's still no review after that, have a CSR. Or if you want to really lock in the review, call them from the owner after 48 hours. If it is a CSR, pay them that incentive bonus because they got the review. If they don't respond to that call, you're pretty much screwed. You can kind of just let them go back in your in your CRM. So, the goal here is to get, depending on your industry, of course, over 30 reviews a month.
If you're in a competitive market and you're in a competitive trade like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, restoration, etc. Um, you are going to need 30 plus reviews a month in order to rank really, really well. AI mode is next. This is the fastest changing piece of local search and the place that most contractors aren't ranking yet because their agencies don't even know it's a channel. So, I put together a super simple three-phase AI ranking strategy. Phase one, which is typically months one through two, you want to set up that Google business profile correctly and become consistent with those photos and those weekly GBP posts. Step number two is actually building what are called citations, otherwise known as listings in online business directories.
So that's things like Yelp, Better Business Bureau, Angie, House, Home Advisor, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps, etc. You want to get your business listed in at least 80 to 120 of these and keep those indexed in every single citation. You want to make sure you use the same name, address, and phone number that is exactly matching your Google business profile. So if I'm man's air conditioning, I want to use this exact address and this exact phone number on your website.
This is critical. You want to have a service page for every single service you offer and a location page for every single city you serve. Now, granted, you don't want to just go spam 300 service pages or location pages cuz they're not going to rank. They're not going to even index. Be intentional. And then also, the way you connect them is you actually do what's called internal linking. So, on the service pages, link to the relevant location pages.
From the location pages, link to all the service pages that you service that area with. And then finally that review velocity system that we just spoke about. It is hyper critical that you are consistent with reviews because as you might know total reviews is important. Average star rating of the reviews is also important. But the number of reviews you get consistently month after month is arguably the most important metric when it comes to showing Google and AI search engines you are trustworthy.
Phase two is authority building. So this is typically months two through five for us. Um we start with press releases. So, these are just two vendors that you can use. We're we're unaffiliated. We use these sometimes. And then typically what I recommend is just doing one press release per month. Um, and it can be about anything. That's the funny thing is a lot of companies think, oh, it needs to be about, you know, some strategic like hire or something. It doesn't. You can write about anything. Hey, maybe you did get a new hire. Maybe you hit a new milestone. Maybe you service a new area. You sponsored, you know, some sort of charity event. The topic doesn't matter. Um, but the consistency of putting them out every month does. I also recommend putting out what are called listical articles.
So, this is an article titled with the URL as well. You know, best HVAC company in Pasadena, California, and you position yourself number one or number two, typically number one. Um, and you put more content about your company and way less about all the competitors. You don't link out to them either. You can put this on your company's blog. You can put it on Medium. You could put it on LinkedIn, which is really high authority. um or you can do guest posts on other contracting sites or even home improvement blogs.
Typically, we recommend doing two to three of these listical articles until they rank um for every single service type. You do want to list real competitors just for legitimacy um because these AI search engines aren't going to believe your article if you use like eight companies that they've never heard of before. And then the last section of authority building is local backlinks. So backlinks are essentially links from other websites that point to your website and it shows Google and AI search engines, hey, this company is authoritative.
They're getting, you know, trusted links from these other sites that we already trust. It must mean they're reputable. So I would start by building a chamber of commerce profile. You're going to have to pay for it. Um, also getting links from your vendor or supplier partner pages. Those are huge because they're super relevant. Also joining contractor association directories, especially local ones. Um, you can also sponsor like.org sites. Typically some charities or nonprofits will give you a link if you do do a sponsorship with them. And then also getting like listed on house and other business directories like that. Those are super super crucial for building authority.
So phase three is the AI signals. So this is typically months four through 7. What I start with is social mentions. So getting listed on local Facebook groups, neighborhood Reddit threads, asking happy customers to recommend you on those as well is huge. I would say one organic mention is equal to at least 10 paid mentions. And a cool strategy is you can actually post on these platforms from a customer's point of view um as the business owner. Not many people talk about this. It is a incredible way to both get customers from those mentions as well as get listed on chatbt AI mode because they pull from Reddit and Facebook groups.
The next is multiplatform reviews. So Google should be your primary focus. The Google business profile is easily the most important. Um, after that I'd say Yelp and then also like Trustpilot can help for some industries, but each platform is a separate data point. And so if you get reviews on Google, Yelp and Trust Pilot, chances are you're going to rank higher in ChatBT and AI mode. Finally, it is brand plus city signals. So just getting your brand or business name plus your city and service page together. Um, this kind of goes back to press releases as well as getting mentioned on local social groups. Um, you can also get listed in the local newspaper, sponsor local sports teams and actually get backlinks from those. And you want to have consistency across all the sources. So this system should help you rank number one not only on Google maps but also chatbt, Gemini, Grock, Perplexity, Claude, etc.
This is the single biggest under the radar opportunity in local SEO right now. And most contractors aren't writing for AI mode yet because their agencies are still pumping out top 10 tips for better HVAC maintenance. that content doesn't rank in AI mode and that content does not get you more book jobs. Question and answer content with structured data does. Organic is last or number three. This is the infrastructure layer that makes everything else compound. So when we talk about organic, we're just referring to normal Google search results. Um so if I look up HVAC companies near me and I scroll down under the map pack, this is going to be the organic search results.
So, typically it's Yelp, Reddit popping up, some other ones like Angie, and then we have real companies that are listed here. As you can see, this company Natles, um, they're ranking first in the map pack. They're also ranking very well on the organic results. They're ranking as the third company, which is incredible for them. They could be doing better. You can actually outrank Yelp and be first on this section as well, which is important, and that's the goal. So, to rank in the organic search results, it comes down to a few things. First things first, you want to have the right site structure. So the homepage is your most important page. And this page should link with the navigation bar as well as other internal links to all your service pages, all your service area or location pages.
And then also you can have like Q&A pages on the side if you really want to rank for those FAQs on AI search. So again, you want to make a separate page for every single service you offer. If you're an HVAC contractor, that's AC repair, furnace replacement, duct cleaning, you know, minlit installation, sheet metal, etc. And then service pages.
Let's say you service Los Angeles. You want to have Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, West Hollywood, Culver City, um, Venice Beach, etc. So, here's a super simple technical SEO checklist. Technical SEO refers to all the technical things on your site that you need to clean up in order to help rank on organic search results, as well as the map pack and AI search. I'm not going to go through this whole list. If you're working with an agency, they should already know this.
If you do want our help to audit and see if you have all these installed, click the first link in the description below to apply to work with us. So, when you rank in all three lanes, customers see you literally three times before they see your competitor once, which is incredible. This is what Hermoszi means when he says post free content for a home service business. Now, obviously, he's also referring to social media. Um, but free content doesn't need to just be blog posts and reals. It's also local search infrastructure, otherwise known as local SEO, built for buying intent. When a customer searches for an HVAC contractor in their city, they should see your business first three times before they see your competitor once.
That's the standard. Ranking in all three sections of Google search results is exactly how we got that HVAC company to generate 1.27 million in just 90 days of total revenue. That's the compounding lever. The website was the prerequisite. Local search is the engine. Step three, LTV to CAC ratio, not cost per lead. When the HVAC company in the intro hired us, their Google ads were running at over $600 cost per lead. Now, most agencies would call that a cost per lead problem. They'd tell you to rebuild the keyword list, add negative match types, adjust geo targeting, retest the ad copy, and that can all contribute. Of course, cost per lead is an important factor, but none of that was the actual problem.
The problem was that they were measuring the wrong thing. Hormosi preaches that cost per lead is kind of just a vanity metric. And the only acquisition math that actually matters or at least is the most important is LTV to CAC ratio. LTV being lifetime value or literally how much does one customer actually make you on average. And then CAC is customer acquisition cost. So literally how much does it cost you to get a new customer. So here's the math applied to a home service ad account. Okay, just to clarify. So this is not the direct example of that HVAC company. Um, but this is just the outlying principle of Hormos's LTV to CAC ratio.
So again, for that HVAC company, we were able to lower the cost per lead from over $600 to, depending on the service, about $150 um, in the one of the most competitive markets in the US. But for proof of concept, let's say that the average cost per lead for a service call customer is $600. And that is totally screwed up, but let's say that it is. And then your average ticket, let's say for, you know, a simple tuneup or if you're a plumber, you do a simple, you know, plumbing repair. Um, you know, you fix a leaky pipe, whatever, and you get 400 bucks back. You are literally losing $200 per every customer. Now, you can make the example that, you know, we could upsell that customer into a sewer line replacement or for HVAC, a full system replacement, and it makes sense, but you don't want to run off that math. You're losing money on the front end.
Now, with a system replacement customer, let's say you're doing a whole new HVAC installation, the average ticket is somewhere around, you know, 15 to 25K and the cost per lead is still $600. You are literally printing money. That is a 41:1 LTV to CAC ratio. So, when you optimize for this instead of cost per lead, you stop killing campaigns based on the wrong metric. And I see this all the time as we take on a new home service business as one of our partners. we look at their ad account and see that they're cancelling all these campaigns that are, you know, $250, $400 cost per lead because they think the cost per lead is too high, but it's actually an LTV to CAC ratio problem
. And we're able to actually help them convert more from those leads. So, turn more of those leads into paying customers as well as make more from those customers. We can actually fix the LTV to CAC ratio and make those ad campaigns that they thought weren't making sense actually incredibly profitable. So this is kind of why we like to organize our campaigns by the service tier. So it's not just, you know, all HVAC services, which is totally screwed up. You don't have enough isolation here in the ad campaign. All the leads are weighted the same.
Cheap leads dominate the budget, etc. You want to heavily segment or isolate all of your ad campaigns and your ad group. So we can go high LTV. We can do replacement. And then we can go specifically into AC replacement, furnace replacement, you know, heat pump, etc. Um, and then do the same for maintenance and then also service calls. So, here's the typical timeline of when we take over an ad account. Kind of what it looks like. So, we will kill unprofitable campaigns. We'll restructure them by the service tier. Um, and then at the point of like day 60, about you know, 2 months give or take in. Google's learning phase has gone through and and done its rounds. Um, we can literally double the budget on those high LTV leads. And you might be paying an absurd amount cost per lead because that's just the nature of advertising with Google ads or even meta these days.
You might be paying a high cost per lead, but if the LTV to CAC ratio is there, you are still able to have really profitable campaigns even when everyone says today that Google ads are too expensive or meta ads don't work. So here is our order of priority for home service paid ads. Google LSA, a lot of people say it's, you know, it's not um cost per lead isn't good. you get crappy leads, but it is literally the highest intent leads. It's pretty much the same as getting a Google business profile lead, except the people might trust you even more because you're Google guaranteed now or Google verified. and so it is high intent, it's high conversion. We see close rates on these averaging 30 to 45% typically. Um, so we definitely try to max out local service ads budget as we can.
The next is Google search ads or pay-per-click. This is your classic Google ads. This is highly controllable, um, highly customizable, and a good marketer can run this and get those LTV to CAC ratios incredibly high. Now, Google search ads might have a lower close rate depending on the lead quality because you are going to get some spam leads, some crappy leads, but um, blended, you still have an incredible LTV to CAC ratio. And then everything else, so meta ads, Yelp, Angie, I don't doubt you can be profitable on those. We just don't recommend them because they're not the highest intent search. People are literally searching on Google for your service.
We would rather pay for our home service companies to rank first in front of those people that are already searching for the service instead of paying to interrupt someone's Instagram doom scrolling session. Most contractors are running their ad accounts against the wrong metric. They're literally optimizing for the cheapest leads. And Hermosi's whole point, which I've stressed here, is that's the trap. The cheapest leads are always the worst customers. The customers worth the most are usually the ones that you can spend the most to acquire. Once that math checks out, you can literally outspend every single competitor in your market on every single click and cost per lead and still print money from your advertising.
That's how the HVAC company in intro went from a $600 cost per lead ad account to a 6.9x rorowaz ad account in just 90 days. We did make the leads cheaper, but that wasn't the big needle mover. We made the math right. So, there's three things to take with you. First, Hermosi's frameworks translate to home service marketing, but only the marketing side. offers, money models, memberships. Uh, that's a different specialist lane. I just stay in the marketing and sales lane.
Second, the order matters. You want to focus on conversion first. So, make sure that your website's dialed in, then SEO and AI search and maps, and then paid ads. If you skip the website fix and run more traffic into a 1% converting website, you're going to lose money on your marketing. Third, LTV to CAC ratio, not cost per lead. The cheapest leads are always the worst customers. The customers that are worth the most typically cost more to acquire, but you make way more on the back end, which is incredibly important. So, if you're running a home service business doing $1.5 million plus a year, link is in the description to apply to work with us.
We'll implement this full Hormosi inspired home service marketing strategy for your business and get you more booked calls from showing up higher on Google search results. See you in the next one.
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