What should an HVAC website have? I read 43 West Michigan HVAC sites: 18 offer a maintenance plan, and one says what it costs

The guides on that first page pick their examples nationally and list features. None can tell an owner in Kentwood which of those features every competitor on the same search already has and which would set the business apart, because that depends on the competitors. This page counts them for eight West Michigan towns, then says what I would put on an HVAC website as a result.

The measurement: 70 listings, 54 companies, 43 pages read

On 23 September 2026, between 12:47 and 12:51 UTC, I asked the Brave Search API for its local results for “HVAC companies <town> MI” in the eight towns I track — Grand Rapids, Wyoming, Kentwood, Grandville, Walker, Holland, Muskegon and Kalamazoo — and kept the first ten listings for each. These are Brave Search’s local results, not Google’s map pack: what one search engine shows for a town on one morning, not a ranking. Walker returned no local listings, as it did that morning for every trade I swept. The other seven towns gave ten each, 70 listings in all; counting a company listed in several towns once leaves 54 companies, 9 of them in two or more towns and one in all seven. The listings of 10 companies name no website, which says nothing about whether those companies have one — only that the listing a searcher sees links none. Of the 44 websites listed, 43 loaded; one timed out, in the sweep and again when I re-read the pages.

The sweep reads the page each listing links to with one curl fetch, the way a search crawler or an AI engine receives it. For 40 of the 43 the listing links to a homepage; three link to an inner page (a contact page, a plumbing-services page, an air-conditioning repair page), and that page is the one read, because it is where the listing sends people. Each row of the table is a yes or no read from that HTML, worded as the sweep measures it: “emergency” means the word, “24/7” or “24-hour” is on the page; online booking means a scheduling tool’s code, or words such as “book online” or “schedule service” anywhere in the HTML. For HVAC it adds two: a maintenance or service plan, agreement, club or membership, and a named equipment maker — Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Rheem, Bryant, American Standard, Goodman, Daikin, Amana, York, Mitsubishi or Ruud. At 13:08 UTC I fetched every page again to read the dollar figures, licence numbers, plans, makers and reviews by hand; the receipts say how.

What the page has (43 HVAC company sites, read 23 Sep 2026)	Sites	Of 43
HTTPS	43	100%
A phone viewport (built for mobile)	43	100%
A tap-to-call link	40	93%
Emergency, 24/7 or 24-hour service mentioned	32	74%
Financing or monthly payments mentioned	27	63%
LocalBusiness-type schema markup	27	63%
“Book online” or “schedule service” wording, or a scheduling tool	23	53%
A contact form in the page’s HTML	21	49%
A free estimate, quote or consultation	20	47%
A warranty or guarantee mentioned	20	47%
A maintenance plan, club, agreement or membership of its own	18	42%
A rating, a review count or a live review feed (read by hand)	11	26%
An equipment maker named (of the twelve the sweep looks for)	11	26%
“Licensed and insured”	11	26%
A dollar figure of any kind	10	23%
A licence number printed	7	16%
An FAQ (FAQ schema or an FAQ heading)	7	16%
A real price, read by hand	3	7%
The maintenance plan’s price	1	2%

Town (23 Sep 2026)	Pages read	Listing names no website	Tap-to-call	Emergency or 24/7	Financing	Maintenance plan	Maker named
Grand Rapids	6	4	6	5	5	5	0
Wyoming	8	2	5	5	5	4	2
Kentwood	9	1	9	8	6	5	3
Grandville	9	1	8	5	7	5	4
Holland	8	2	7	7	7	2	3
Muskegon	9	1	9	8	6	4	1
Kalamazoo	9	0	9	7	5	3	2
Walker	no local listings returned — not measured

Grand Rapids stands out: four of its ten listings name no website, so only six pages could be read, and none of the six names an equipment maker. Holland is thin on plans, two of eight. A town row counts a company once in that town — a company listed in three towns is in three rows — and reads the page that town’s listing links to, which is not always the homepage; the first table counts each company once.

Built for the no-heat call

The baseline is about making the phone ring. All 43 pages are on HTTPS with a phone viewport, and 40 have a tap-to-call link (why, and why a text link too). 32 mention emergency, 24/7 or 24-hour service and 27 mention financing — against 18 and 20 of 46 on the roofing sites I read the same morning, which fits a trade whose calls often start with a system that has stopped.

The free estimate goes the other way: 40 of 46 roofing homepages offer one, and 20 of these 43 offer a free estimate, quote or consultation. HVAC work often starts as a service call rather than a quote, and no page says what a service call costs; the only diagnostic fee printed is the $0 one company’s plan members pay (read 23 September 2026).

23 have “book online” or “schedule service” wording or a scheduling tool, against 12 of 46 roofers; most match on the words alone, and 5 load a scheduling widget’s code (ServiceTitan’s scheduler or ScheduleEngine). 27 carry LocalBusiness schema (what it does), 21 have a contact form in the HTML — a floor, since a form drawn by script is invisible to one fetch — and 20 mention a warranty or guarantee.

The maintenance plan: on 18 pages, priced on one

The HVAC-specific thing I most wanted to count was the maintenance plan: the tune-up club, service agreement or membership a company sells by the month or the year. 18 of the 43 name a plan, club, agreement or membership of their own, and on most of them the plan is a word in the menu. A few describe it, and one lists six perks — two tune-ups a year, 10% off repairs, member pricing, a no-breakdown guarantee, a $0 diagnostic fee, a water-heater flush — without saying what joining costs (read 23 September 2026). One of the 18 prints its price: $19 a month.

That is also a third of all the prices on the 43 pages. Ten print a dollar figure, and I read every one by hand (read 23 September 2026). Three are prices, all for maintenance: a $78 furnace tune-up (a coupon price with an end date), a $75.99 HVAC tune-up and the $19-a-month plan. The other seven print offers only — coupons from $10 to $253 off, a rebate of up to $300, up to $2,700 and 0% financing for five years on a new system, and the members’ $0 diagnostic fee — plus a saving a customer mentions in a review, which is not a price. No page prints what a service call costs or a range for a new system; the nearest is “from $113/mo” for a whole-system installation, which is financing. None is drawn by script; even the $19, which counts up on screen, is in the HTML a crawler receives.

18 of 43 HVAC pages offer a maintenance plan. One says what it costs.

A plan and a tune-up are the easiest things an HVAC company sells to price without seeing the house, and three pages show it can be done. If you sell a plan, the homepage should say what it costs, what a member gets and how to join; a tune-up price does the same job for the homeowner not ready to join. The wider case for starting prices is on the prices page.

Whose equipment, and who may install it

The maker. 11 of the 43 name at least one of the twelve makers the sweep looks for. All eleven are real brand mentions, not a stray “carrier” or “New York”, and five say they are a named maker’s dealer: two Bryant, two Trane, one American Standard. A search of the other 32 for more than thirty further makers, from Bosch and Fujitsu to Heil and Navien, found none. So 32 of 43 homepages name no maker at all, though which make goes in is something a replacement customer will ask. If you install one maker’s equipment or hold its dealer status, say so, and what, if anything, it adds to the warranty.

The licence. Michigan licenses the work itself: under the Skilled Trades Regulation Act, installing, altering or servicing the heating, cooling and refrigeration work the Act classifies — where the state construction code covers it — requires that the company, or someone it employs, hold a mechanical contractor’s licence classified for that work, and that the licence holder secure the permit; the exceptions include a homeowner installing a system in the single-family house they live in (MCL 339.5809 and 339.5819; the ten classifications, from HVAC equipment and ductwork to limited and unlimited heating service, are in MCL 339.5807; all read 23 September 2026 on legislature.mi.gov). LARA, the state licensing agency, handles mechanical contractor licensing through its Bureau of Construction Codes, and its online services page carries a public “Find / Verify a BCC Licensed Professional or Business” lookup (michigan.gov/lara, read 23 September 2026). I am not a lawyer; that is a summary of the sections linked in the receipts.

A printed number turns “licensed” from a word into something a customer can look up, so I looked. 11 of the 43 pages say “licensed and insured”. 7 print a licence number: four after “License #” or “License:”, and three labelled as a mechanical contractor licence. All seven are mechanical contractor licences with the status “Issued” on LARA’s public pages (read 23 September 2026). Only 2 of the 11 that say “licensed and insured” print a number at all.

Before the website: the listing

Ten of the 54 companies have a listing that names no website — against two of 54 roofers that morning — and four of them are in Grand Rapids, four of the city’s ten listings. That does not mean they have no website; it means a searcher comparing companies there cannot click through to theirs from the listing. On 15 September all 40 top-ten Google Maps listings I read for four Grand Rapids trades, HVAC among them, carried a website link (the website-or-profile page); in Brave’s list nearly one HVAC company in five has none. Check your listings on more than one engine (where to list a Grand Rapids business).

Where a listing points matters too. Of the 59 listings that name a website, 9 link an inner page rather than the homepage: six a page named for a town, two of those about plumbing; two a contact page; one an air-conditioning repair page. So two “HVAC companies” listings land on a plumbing page — point each listing at the page that matches the search. Five land on a page for the town they were listed in, which is what a town page is for, as long as it says something about the town the homepage does not.

The pages name a median of one of the eight sweep towns; four name none and twelve name four or more. Towns outside the eight, such as Portage or Zeeland, are not counted, so this undercounts companies away from Grand Rapids; name the towns you serve on the homepage and in your schema either way.

Reviews, FAQs and weight

Reviews. 11 of 43 show a rating, count or live review feed (read by hand), which leaves 32 with nothing on the page a visitor comparing HVAC companies can check. Nine of those 32 quote customers by name instead, with no rating or count beside the quotes (how to show reviews honestly).

An FAQ. 7 of 43 have one. The questions are easy to list — what a service call costs, whether you come out at night and at weekends, which makers you service, what the plan includes — and an FAQ answers them before the phone rings (why and how).

Weight. The median page is 273 KB of HTML alone, before images and other files load, and four are over 1 MB of HTML (why speed matters).

Verdict: what an HVAC website should have

Element	West Michigan HVAC pages (of 43)	Verdict
HTTPS, a phone viewport, tap-to-call	43, 43, 40	Table stakes.
Emergency, 24/7 or 24-hour service	32	Yes, if someone answers. Say which hours.
Financing	27	Yes, if you offer it.
LocalBusiness schema	27	Yes. Search engines read it; visitors never see it.
Book or schedule online	23	Worth it when the calendar is real.
A free estimate or quote	20	For replacements. For repairs, print the service-call cost.
A maintenance plan	18	Yes: what a member gets, and how to join.
The plan’s price	1	The biggest HVAC gap. Print it.
Any real price	3	Start with the tune-up and the plan.
Equipment makers named	11	Yes, with any dealer status.
A licence number	7	Yes. Print it, and label it if you hold more than one.
A rating, count or live review feed	11	Yes: a rating and a count a visitor can check.
An FAQ	7	Yes: service call, hours, makers, the plan.
A listing that names your website	44 of 54 companies	Check every listing and where it points.

What this reading does not prove

• One engine, one morning. What Brave Search’s local results showed for each town on 23 September 2026: not Google’s map pack, not a ranking, not every HVAC company in West Michigan.
• One page per company, HTML only. A plan priced on its own page, a price in an image, or a form or widget drawn by script is invisible here. Every count is a floor.
• Pattern counts. Apart from the plans, reviews, licence numbers, makers and prices, which I read page by page, every row is a pattern’s count, and a pattern can miss what a person would see.
• Mentions, not substance. “24/7” on a page does not prove anyone answers at 3 a.m., and nothing here measures which of these wins calls.
• The law is summarised from the sections linked in the receipts, and I am not a lawyer.

How we build an HVAC site

An HVAC site we build starts from the verdict table above rather than a template: the plan and its price near the top, the hours you actually answer, the makers you install, your licence number, reviews from your Google profile and the towns you serve. HVAC companies sell many distinct jobs — the ten in Google’s Grand Rapids map pack that I read on 15 September linked a median 15.5 service pages from the home page (how many pages a contractor site needs) — so pages grow with the jobs you want the phone to ring for. The Starter Site is from $999 for up to three pages, or $149 a month for twelve months; the Business Site is $2,499 starting for five to eight pages; the Growth Site + Tool (from $4,999) adds one custom tool, such as a booking or intake bot or missed-call-to-text. A Care Plan is from $199 a month. None of the advice above depends on hiring us.

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