THE MONEY IS IN THE SEASON EVERYONE TREATS AS THE OFF-SEASON
Bay Area furnace searches run 25 times higher in February than in May, and the click costs four times what an air conditioning click costs. We pulled twelve months of Google data for San Jose to find out when HVAC companies should actually be spending.
The advice you will find contradicts itself
Search for HVAC marketing advice and page one gives you eight listicles, most of them published by field-service software companies. ServiceTitan tells you to spend 10% to 20% of sales. Google’s own AI summary of the same page says 5% to 10% of revenue. Neither cites a Bay Area number, because neither is looking at one.
So we pulled the numbers ourselves. Below is what Californians actually searched for around San Jose over the last twelve months, and what it costs to buy a click on each term. The pattern it shows is not in any of those guides.
Air conditioning and heating are six months out of phase
Everyone knows HVAC is seasonal. What the guides never show you is how violent the swing is, or that the two halves of the business peak at opposite ends of the year.
“AC repair san jose” monthly searches, California
Google Ads monthly volume, August 2025 to June 2026. Orange marks the cooling season.
Now the same city, the other half of the trade.
“Furnace repair san jose” monthly searches, California
Google Ads monthly volume, August 2025 to June 2026. The peak lands in February.
Furnace repair runs at 40 searches in May and 1,000 in February. That is a twenty-five fold swing inside one city. AC repair moves from 140 in January to 720 in June, a fivefold swing. If your budget is flat across the year, you are paying the same money for a quarter of the demand for months at a time.
The furnace click costs four times the AC click
This is the part that surprised us. Cost per click on “ac repair san jose” sits at $45.27, with competition rated high at 69 out of 100. Cost per click on “furnace repair san jose” is $176.73, and competition is low, at 22.
Fewer companies bid on the heating term, and the ones that do pay heavily for it. A furnace failure in February is not a comparison-shopping event. The house is cold, the customer calls the first credible company, and the job is often a replacement rather than a repair. The click is expensive because the job behind it is worth more.
Most Bay Area HVAC companies market themselves as air conditioning specialists through the summer and go quiet in winter. The data says the quiet half of the year is where the expensive, less contested work is.
Nobody is searching for “HVAC San Jose”, and everybody optimises for it
Here is the term most HVAC websites are built around, month by month: 880, 1,600, 880, 880, 1,000, 880, 590, 1,000, 720, 880, 880.
It barely moves. It also converts differently from what you would hope. Someone typing “ac repair san jose” has a broken air conditioner. Someone typing “hvac san jose” might be a homeowner browsing, a commercial buyer, or a technician looking for work. Competition on it is rated 94 out of 100, the highest of anything we measured, and the cost per click is the lowest at $26.88. Cheap clicks and fierce competition usually mean the same thing, which is that the traffic does not convert.
Build the service and city pages around the terms with the problem baked in. That is the same principle behind local SEO for contractors generally, and it is why our study of what Bay Area homeowners actually type into Google keeps finding that the specific term beats the broad one.
San Jose is the air conditioning market. San Francisco is not.
Bay Area micro-climates show up in the search data plainly. Around San Jose, “ac repair” averages 720 searches a month. The Oakland equivalent averages 20. “Heating repair san francisco” averages 20 as well. Fremont HVAC repair sits at 50.
San Francisco homes largely do not have air conditioning, and the coastal fog means many never will. San Jose gets genuinely hot. If you serve the whole Bay Area, that is not one market with one message. A San Jose page should lead on cooling and emergency response. A San Francisco page should lead on heating, indoor air quality and the retrofit work that follows the state’s building energy efficiency standards.
The volumes outside San Jose are small enough that paid search will not carry them. They are, however, easy to rank for organically, which makes them a better fit for city pages than for ad spend.
What to do, month by month
The seasonality is predictable, so the calendar can be too.
- March to May. Cooling demand is climbing and furnace demand has collapsed. Cheapest window of the year to buy AC clicks before the June competition arrives. Push maintenance agreements now, while nobody is in crisis.
- June to September. Peak cooling. Bid hard on repair terms, and make sure the phone gets answered, because a missed call in July is a competitor’s booked job by lunchtime.
- October to November. The quiet stretch. This is when to earn reviews and build the pages that need months to rank. Nothing you publish in February will rank in February.
- December to February. Furnace season, expensive clicks, high-value jobs. Budget for it deliberately rather than treating it as the off-season.
The same logic applies to any weather-driven trade. We ran the equivalent numbers for roofing in marketing for roofers, and why June decides your November, and the shape is the same: the work that produces winter revenue happens in summer. Plumbing runs on a different clock: drain cleaning searches barely move all year while water heater repair climbs in winter, which we break down in plumbing marketing in the Bay Area.
The free things still matter more than the paid ones
None of the above replaces the basics. A complete Google Business Profile is still the single highest-return thing an HVAC company can fix, and Google’s own guidelines on representing your business spell out exactly what they expect. Service area, hours, and a licence number that matches the CSLB register all feed the trust signals that decide the map pack.
If you run Google Local Services Ads alongside this, the Google Guaranteed badge requires that same licence and insurance verification. Getting the profile right is a prerequisite for both, not a separate task. Google has since renamed that badge Google Verified and dropped the money-back guarantee behind it, which we cover along with what each lead costs in Google Local Services Ads cost for contractors.
How we got these numbers
Volumes come from the Google Ads keyword planner, pulled on 20 August 2026, with the location set to California and the language set to English. Cost per click is the planner’s own top-of-page estimate. We measured the terms directly rather than modelling them.
Two honest caveats. First, September 2025 shows an unusually high reading across nearly every keyword in this niche, not just HVAC, which makes it look like a data artifact rather than real demand. We have left it in the charts and are not drawing conclusions from it. Second, the December 2025 figure of 1,600 for AC repair sits well outside the surrounding pattern and we cannot explain it; treat it the same way. The seasonal shape holds with or without those two points.
Planner volumes are also rounded and volatile month to month. Use them for direction, not for forecasting revenue.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should an HVAC company start advertising for winter?
Start the organic work in October, when furnace demand is still low. Pages and reviews take months to compound, and anything published in January arrives too late for that season. Paid budget should shift toward heating terms in late November.
How much should an HVAC company spend on marketing?
The published advice ranges from 5% to 20% of revenue, which is wide enough to be useless on its own. A more practical starting point is to work backwards from cost per click and close rate in your own cities, because a $176 furnace click and a $45 AC click cannot share one flat budget.
Is it worth targeting “HVAC” plus my city name?
Rank for it, but do not build your strategy on it. Around San Jose that term is the most competitive we measured and the cheapest per click, which usually signals traffic that does not convert. Terms containing the actual problem, such as AC repair or furnace repair, bring people who need work done today.
Do Bay Area HVAC companies need to advertise for air conditioning at all?
It depends entirely on which side of the hills you serve. Around San Jose, cooling demand is real and worth competing for. In San Francisco, where most housing has no air conditioning, heating and indoor air quality are the better focus.
How long does HVAC SEO take to work?
Expect three to six months before rankings move meaningfully, longer in a competitive city. That is why the seasonal calendar matters: the work has to start a season ahead of the demand you want to capture.
Want the same numbers for your cities?
We pull this data for every company we work with before recommending anything, because the answer changes between San Jose and San Rafael. If you want to see what your own service area looks like, our free marketing audit shows where you rank now and which three fixes move it fastest. You can also read how we approach HVAC marketing and SEO in more detail.