13,000+ contractors scored | 217 US metros | All 50 states + DC | Free
By Dennis Yu
The HVAC Marketing Scorecard is a free tool that scores heating and cooling contractors on a 0-100 scale across four categories: Maps Visibility, Website Quality, SEO Authority, and Social & Content. It covers 217 US metros, all 50 states plus DC, and over 13,000 scored companies. Any HVAC contractor can look up their business, see their letter grade, and find out exactly where they’re falling behind their local competitors.
The scorecard exists because most HVAC contractors have no idea how their online presence compares to the company two miles away. They know they need more reviews. They know their website could be better. But they don’t know whether their 40 Google reviews put them in the top 10% of their metro or the bottom half. The scorecard answers that question with data.
What is the HVAC Marketing Scorecard?
It’s a publicly searchable database that grades every HVAC contractor in a metro on their digital marketing. Type in your company name, get a grade from A to F, and see how you rank against every other contractor in your city.
The grading uses a national percentile curve. The top 10% of contractors nationally earn an A. The next 20% get a B. The middle 40% land at C. The next 20% receive a D. The bottom 10% get an F. So an A doesn’t mean you’re perfect. It means you’re doing better than 90% of HVAC contractors across the country on the signals that matter for getting found online.
The tool was built by BlitzMetrics and lives on Local Service Spotlight, a site dedicated to helping local service businesses understand and improve their digital marketing. The scoring methodology pulls from the same data sources that Google, Bing, and AI search engines use to decide which businesses to surface. If you’re invisible to those systems, you’re invisible to the homeowner searching “AC repair near me” at 2 PM on a July afternoon.
How the scoring works
Every company gets scored across four categories, each worth 25 points. The total adds up to 100.
Maps Visibility (25 points)
This category measures how strong your Google Business Profile is and whether you show up when someone searches for HVAC services on Google Maps.
The signals: review count (up to 8 points), average star rating (up to 5 points), photo count (up to 4 points), whether you’ve claimed your GBP listing (3 points), and your actual ranking position in Maps for HVAC-related searches in your city (up to 5 points).
A contractor with 200+ reviews, a 4.7 rating, 50 photos, a claimed listing, and a top-3 Maps position will score close to 25. A contractor with 3 reviews and an unclaimed listing will score in the single digits.
The median HVAC contractor in the US has fewer than 30 Google reviews. If you have 80+, you’re already ahead of most of the country.
Website Quality (25 points)
This category checks whether your website works and whether it has the features that convert visitors into leads.
The signals: Google PageSpeed mobile score (up to 8 points), SSL certificate (3 points), mobile-friendliness (3 points), blog presence (4 points), chat widget (4 points), and analytics tracking (3 points).
PageSpeed gets the most weight because Google uses it as a ranking factor, and because slow mobile sites lose visitors. The industry average for HVAC contractor sites on mobile PageSpeed is below 40 out of 100. A score above 80 puts you in rare company.
Blog and chat widget detection matters because those features correlate with companies that actively invest in their web presence. A blog indicates content marketing effort. A chat widget indicates investment in lead capture.
SEO Authority (25 points)
This category measures whether search engines consider your site authoritative enough to rank for competitive terms.
The signals: estimated monthly organic traffic (up to 7 points), number of ranking keywords (up to 5 points), referring domains (up to 5 points), total backlinks (up to 4 points), and domain authority (up to 4 points).
These aren’t vanity metrics. Referring domains and organic traffic are two of the strongest predictors of whether you’ll rank on page one for searches like “best HVAC company in [city]” or “AC installation near me.” A company with 50+ referring domains and 500+ organic monthly visitors has a real SEO moat. A company with zero backlinks and no organic traffic is starting from scratch every time they want to get found.
Social & Content (25 points)
This category checks whether you’re building trust through social proof and video content.
The signals: Facebook page presence (5 points), YouTube channel (5 points), YouTube video count (up to 5 points), Instagram presence (5 points), and video testimonials (5 points).
Video matters more than most contractors realize. A YouTube channel with 20+ videos tells Google you’re a real, active business. Customer testimonial videos build trust faster than any written review. And social media profiles give you additional real estate in search results when someone Googles your company name.
The grading curve
Early versions of the scorecard used fixed thresholds: 80-100 = A, 60-79 = B, and so on. After scoring 9,000 companies, the result was 0% As, 0.3% Bs, and 50% Fs. The problem wasn’t the scoring model. The problem was assuming most HVAC businesses have their digital marketing together. They don’t.
The fix was a national percentile curve:
| Grade | Percentile | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A | Top 10% | You’re outperforming 90% of HVAC contractors nationally |
| B | Next 20% | Above average, solid presence, room to improve |
| C | Middle 40% | Average, you blend in with the pack |
| D | Next 20% | Below average, competitors are outpacing you |
| F | Bottom 10% | Minimal digital presence, hard to find online |
This means the grades shift as the industry improves. If every contractor in the country suddenly got 100 Google reviews, the bar for an A would move up with it. The curve measures you against your peers, not against an arbitrary standard.
What the data shows about the HVAC industry
After scoring 13,000+ contractors across every major US metro, some patterns are clear.
Reviews are the widest gap. The top 10% of contractors have 150+ Google reviews. The median has fewer than 30. That gap is the single biggest differentiator in Maps visibility, and it’s the easiest one to close with a systematic review request process.
Most contractor websites are slow on mobile. The median PageSpeed mobile score for HVAC contractor sites is below 40. Google’s threshold for “good” is 90. Almost nobody hits it. The contractors who do tend to be on modern platforms (WordPress with lightweight themes, Squarespace, or custom builds) rather than legacy page builders.
SEO is winner-take-all at the local level. In most metros, the top 3-5 contractors own 80%+ of the organic search traffic for HVAC-related terms. Everyone else splits the scraps. The gap between position 3 and position 10 on Google isn’t a gradual slope. It’s a cliff.
Social media is the least developed category across the board. Fewer than 15% of scored contractors have a YouTube channel. Fewer than 25% have an Instagram presence. Video testimonials are even rarer. This is also the category where a small investment creates the largest relative improvement in your score.
How the scorecard gets built
The system behind the scorecard has five layers. Each one feeds the next.
Harvest pulls every HVAC contractor in a metro from Google Maps. It searches multiple keywords (“hvac”, “heating and cooling”, “ac repair”, “furnace repair”, and more) and deduplicates the results. Cost: about $0.20 per metro. The full 217-metro harvest cost around $40 total.
Enrich runs each company through nine data pipelines that fill in roughly 25 data points per business. Four pipelines are free (Google PageSpeed, website scraping, YouTube channel detection, Facebook URL extraction). Five are paid (organic traffic estimates, backlink profiles, technology detection, Maps ranking). Every pipeline checks for existing data before processing, so re-runs never waste API spend.
Score takes the enrichment data and computes the 0-100 score using the rubric described above, then applies the national percentile curve to assign letter grades.
Display is the searchable frontend at localservicespotlight.com/hvac-scorecard. Search for your company, see your grade, see how you rank in your metro. The top 10 leaderboard per metro is public. Full breakdowns are available after entering your email.
Outreach turns scores into conversations. When a contractor enters their email to see their full results, the system generates specific recommendations based on their weakest category. “You have 12 reviews but your metro’s top competitors average 85. Here’s what to fix first.”
How to use your score
Look up your company. Note your overall grade and your four category scores. Then focus on the weakest category first.
If Maps Visibility is your weakest area, the fix is almost always reviews. Set up a systematic process: send a review request link via text or email after every completed job. Ask during the follow-up call. Put a QR code on your invoice. The contractors who go from 20 reviews to 100+ in six months are the ones who built it into their daily operations, not the ones who asked once and forgot.
If Website Quality is dragging you down, check your PageSpeed score at pagespeed.web.dev. If you’re below 50 on mobile, the problem is usually oversized images, unminified JavaScript, or a bloated page builder theme. A WordPress site on a lightweight theme with properly compressed images can score 90+ without any technical magic.
If SEO Authority is your gap, you need backlinks and content. Write pages targeting the specific services you offer in the specific cities you serve. “AC Installation in [Your City]” pages with real project photos and pricing ranges build both keyword coverage and domain authority over time. Get listed in local directories, your chamber of commerce, and industry associations for referring domain growth.
If Social & Content needs work, start with video. Shoot 60-second customer testimonial videos on a phone after a completed installation. Post them to a YouTube channel and your Google Business Profile. You don’t need production quality. You need proof that real customers are happy with your work.
Who uses the HVAC Scorecard
HVAC contractors use it to benchmark themselves. Before the scorecard, most contractors had no idea where they stood relative to local competitors. Now they can see the gap in concrete terms: how many more reviews the top company has, how much more organic traffic they’re getting, whether competitors have YouTube channels or chat widgets they’re missing.
Digital marketing agencies use it as a prospecting and diagnostic tool. Instead of guessing what a prospect needs, the scorecard provides a data-backed starting point for the conversation. “Your Maps score is 8 out of 25, and here’s exactly why” is a more compelling opening than a generic pitch.
Dennis Yu and the BlitzMetrics team built it as a demonstration of the Dollar a Day and Content Factory methodologies applied to local service lead generation. The scorecard generates leads by giving away useful data, building trust before asking for anything.
Build it for your vertical
The HVAC Scorecard was built as a replicable system. The same five-layer architecture (Harvest, Enrich, Score, Display, Outreach) works for any local service vertical: plumbing, roofing, dental, legal, pest control, landscaping. The scoring categories stay the same. The keyword lists and business type filters change.
The full codebase, enrichment pipelines, scoring rubrics, and deployment configs are documented in a public playbook on GitHub: github.com/Goodrich-Dev/vertical-scorecard-playbook. It covers everything from initial metro harvesting through API setup, database schema, frontend deployment, and cost breakdowns.
If you want to build a scorecard for your vertical, the playbook walks through every step. Fork the repo, swap the keywords and business type, and run the harvest. The enrichment pipelines are vertical-agnostic. The scoring rubric needs minor threshold adjustments based on industry norms (a dental practice and an HVAC contractor have different review count expectations), but the structure stays the same.
Total cost to stand up a new vertical: roughly $40-60 for the initial data harvest and enrichment across 200+ metros, plus standard hosting costs for the Next.js frontend and Supabase database.
Related frameworks
The HVAC Marketing Scorecard connects to several BlitzMetrics frameworks:
Dollar a Day is the paid amplification strategy that complements the scorecard’s organic analysis. The scorecard identifies what to fix. Dollar a Day amplifies the content you create while fixing it.
Content Factory is the production system for creating the videos, blog posts, and social content that improve scores in the Social & Content and SEO Authority categories.
Goals, Content, Targeting (GCT) maps every piece of content to a business goal, a content type, and a target audience. Contractors who use GCT to plan their content strategy tend to improve their scores faster because every piece of content they create is designed to move a specific needle.
Learn, Do, Teach (LDT) is the skill development model the scorecard was built under. The entire build process is documented as a teachable playbook so anyone at BlitzMetrics can replicate it for a new vertical.
Check your score
The HVAC Marketing Scorecard is free. Look up your company, see your grade, and find out where you stand against competitors in your metro.
Built by BlitzMetrics and Local Service Spotlight. Scoring methodology uses data from Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Maps, DataForSEO, and the YouTube Data API. Last full scoring run: 2026. Data refreshed monthly.