When should an HVAC company do the local SEO work for a seasonal spike?

Why can the work not wait for the season?

Because Google has published the timeline and it does not fit. On requesting a recrawl, Google states that crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. It adds that requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all. And it closes off the obvious workaround: there is a quota for submitting individual URLs, and requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL will not get it crawled any faster.

Set that against how the demand actually arrives. The first genuine cold snap or the first week over thirty degrees does not build slowly. The phone starts on a Monday and the people searching are not comparing five companies, they are calling whoever appears and answers.

So the page that captures a spike has to be indexed and already ranking when the spike begins. There is no version of this where you write the page during the heatwave and benefit from it during the same heatwave.

What does that mean for a business with two seasons?

It means the calendar inverts. You write the heating content in summer and the cooling content in winter, when nobody is reading either. That feels wrong to every contractor we have said it to, and it is the only sequence that works.

The practical version is simpler than it sounds. Each season has one period where the work is quiet and the next season is far enough away that a page has time to be crawled, indexed and to settle. That period is when the writing, the profile updates and the photography happen. The season itself is for answering the phone.

The lead times we work to are our own practice rather than a figure Google publishes. What Google publishes is the crawl window, and everything sensible follows from allowing considerably more than that window before you need the page to perform.

Should the off-season page come down?

No, and this is the most common self-inflicted wound in the category. Contractors take down the heating page in spring because it looks irrelevant, then rebuild it in autumn and wonder why it performs worse every year.

Follow the crawl facts through. A page that is removed and recreated is a new URL as far as Google is concerned, and a new URL re-enters the queue Google describes as taking days to weeks, with no guarantee attached. Anything the old page had accumulated does not transfer to a page that did not exist for six months.

Leave both seasons live all year. Update them rather than replacing them. The off-season page costs you nothing to keep and it is the page that carries whatever history it has built into the next spike.

How should the Business Profile handle a demand spike?

This is the one part of the work that can be done inside the season, because profile edits are not subject to the same build-and-index cycle as a new page. Google separates three things that contractors routinely use interchangeably.

• Regular hours are the baseline. If you genuinely take calls around the clock during a spike, set the day to open 24 hours rather than writing it in the description.
• More hours is a separate field for services that run to different times from the main hours, which is where a distinct callout or emergency window belongs.
• Special hours cover a temporary adjustment or a closure of up to 6 days in a row. Public holidays during a heatwave are exactly what this is for.
• Temporarily closed is the setting Google names for a closure of 7 or more days in a row, or for an unknown period. Using special hours to cover a longer shutdown is the wrong field.

What should a genuinely seasonal operator do in the off-season?

If you shut down entirely for a season, Google's own instruction is to mark the profile Temporarily closed rather than leave misleading hours in place. That is the honest setting and it is what the guidance says for a closure of seven or more days.

It is worth being clear-eyed about the cost. A profile marked temporarily closed is telling everyone who finds it that you are not available, which is accurate and unhelpful in equal measure. Most contractors who think they are seasonal are not: they are quiet in one season and busy in the other, which is a scheduling problem rather than a closure. Those businesses should stay open with accurate hours and let the quiet season fund the content for the busy one.

What should be ready before the weather turns?

A short list, finished early rather than a long list finished late.

• The season's main page written, published and confirmed indexed, well before you need it to rank.
• The services list on the profile matching what you actually want the calls for, not everything you are capable of.
• Photographs taken in the right season. A snow-covered heat pump shot in July is a photograph you cannot take in July.
• Hours decided in advance, including whether the spike weeks run to 24 hours, so the change is a two-minute edit rather than a decision made at 7am.
• Your licence or certification details correct on the profile, which for HVAC is a legal question in some markets rather than a presentational one. We have written up where the licence number is actually required.
• Review requests sent to the customers from the last spike, not the ones from this one, who have not been served yet.

How does the year actually run?