Plain language
Every term a marketing company might use on you, translated. We wrote this so you can read everyone else's reports.
We have a rule here: if a report needs a glossary, we've failed. Your monthly numbers should read like your job: calls, quotes, booked jobs, and where you show up in your towns.
So why does this page exist?
Because you're going to get cold-called by someone selling geogrids and schema and domain authority, and you deserve to know whether they're describing real work or reading from a script. Half of this vocabulary exists to make simple things sound expensive.
Nothing here is complicated. It's just been kept vague on purpose, by people who bill by the hour.
The work of getting your company to show up when homeowners search for heating and cooling help. It covers your Google listing, your website, and your reviews. It isn't one thing you buy. It's a set of assets you build and keep.
Go deeper →SEO aimed at a service area instead of the whole internet. It decides whether you appear when someone in your town searches "AC repair near me." Proximity, your Google listing, and your reviews carry most of the weight.
Go deeper →The three businesses with map pins near the top of local results. For most HVAC companies this is where the majority of calls come from. Getting in is decided by proximity, your Google Business Profile, and your reviews.
Go deeper →The regular listings below the ads and the map. Nobody pays for these. It's where research-stage homeowners land: "heat pump vs furnace," "why is my AC freezing." Decided by your pages and how well they answer the question asked.
The page you get after you search. Worth knowing because it's crowded: an AI answer on top, then Local Services Ads, then regular ads, then the map, then the organic results. Your competition isn't only other companies. It's the page layout.
The umbrella term for everything you do to show up in search, paid and organic together. You'll see it on proposals, usually without a definition. You don't need the word. You need to know which channel you're buying and what it costs per booked job.
Go deeper →The work of getting your company named when a homeowner asks an AI tool who to call. It runs on the same raw materials as local SEO: accurate business information, strong reviews, and clear answers to real questions. The outcome is being the recommendation, not a link.
Go deeper →The same discipline as AEO with a different acronym, aimed at engines that write answers from scratch. In practice the work overlaps almost entirely. If someone quotes you separately for both, ask them what's actually different.
Go deeper →Google's AI-written summary above the results. It answers the question on the page, so fewer people scroll. Being named inside the summary is the new version of ranking first.
Go deeper →A search that ends without anyone clicking through to a website. The answer was already there: the map, the stars, the AI summary. Most searches now end this way, which is why your Google listing matters more than your homepage.
Go deeper →Your free listing on Google Search and Maps: the pin, the stars, the photos, the call button. For most HVAC companies it's the real homepage, because homeowners call straight from it without ever visiting your website.
Go deeper →The main business type on your Google listing, picked from Google's fixed list. For most HVAC companies it should be "HVAC contractor." It decides which searches you're eligible to appear for at all, which makes it the highest-stakes dropdown in local search.
Go deeper →The green badge on Local Services Ads. You earn it by passing a background check and verifying your license and insurance. Google then backs the job for the homeowner up to a capped amount. It's a stranger's endorsement at the moment someone decides whether to let you in the house.
Go deeper →The ads with photos and a badge at the very top of the results. You pay per contact instead of per click, and your profile is the ad. Position runs on reviews, response speed, and proximity: the same things that decide your map ranking.
Go deeper →How close your business address is to the person searching. It's the one local ranking factor you can't change, and it's why you rank well in your own town and worse three towns over. Everything else in this glossary is how you compete anyway.
Your name, address, and phone number spelled identically everywhere they appear online. Boring, invisible, and decisive. Engines cross-check them to confirm you're one real business. "Smith HVAC" and "Smith Heating & Air" read as two different companies.
Any place online that lists your business name, address, and phone number: directories, review sites, chambers of commerce. Think of them as reference checks. Accuracy and consistency matter. Sheer quantity does not.
How steadily you earn new reviews over time, rather than how many you have in total. A few real reviews every week reads as a living business. Fifty in one weekend reads as bought, to the ranking systems and to the homeowner scrolling through them.
Go deeper →A map of where you rank, street by street, across your whole service area instead of from one lucky spot. Your rank isn't a single number; it changes block by block. This is how you see it honestly.
Go deeper →Pages built for the towns you actually serve, so engines understand where you work. Build them only for places your trucks really go. Engines cross-check, and homeowners bounce off a fake local page fast.
The find-a-dealer page on a manufacturer's website. A listing there is a page on a domain you do not own, run by a company homeowners already trust, describing what you do. Most dealers fill in one ZIP code and leave every other field blank.
Go deeper →Code behind the scenes telling engines exactly what your business does, where it works, and how to reach you. Machines read it. Homeowners never see it. It's how you stop making an engine guess.
The clickable headline in search results, and the words in your browser tab. Roughly 60 characters. It's the most-read line of text on your website, and most companies waste it on their own company name.
The gray text under the headline in search results. It doesn't move your ranking directly. It does decide whether anyone clicks, which amounts to the same thing from where you're standing.
Indexed means Google has your page and can show it. Noindex is an instruction telling Google to ignore the page completely. It's usually left over from when a site was being built, and it's the most expensive checkbox on the internet.
How fast your site loads, usually on a phone, often on a weak signal in a hot kitchen. Slow pages lose calls before anyone reads a word.
A third-party score estimating how strong a website looks. Useful shorthand between marketers. It isn't a Google number, Google doesn't use it, and no homeowner ever hired the company with the better score. Treat it as a conversation starter, never a goal.
Go deeper →A phrase someone types into a search box. Yours are already in your call log: "blowing warm air," "furnace won't kick on." Not what you'd call the problem. What the customer calls it.
Go deeper →A longer, more specific search: "Carrier furnace code 33" or "heat pump repair Ellicott City." Fewer searches each, far easier to win, and the person searching is closer to calling.
Go deeper →What the person actually wants. "AC repair near me" wants a phone number. "Why is my AC freezing up" wants an answer. Same topic, different pages. Mixing them up is why pages get traffic and no calls.
Go deeper →A pillar is the one thorough page on a subject. The cluster is the smaller pages around it, all linking back. It's how you come to own an entire topic instead of a scattering of unrelated keywords.
Go deeper →Pages answering the questions homeowners are nervous about: what things cost, how you quote, what is included, and who you are not the right company for. They rarely rank for glamorous terms, and they are what somebody reads right before deciding to call you.
Go deeper →Google's shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Not a score you can look up. For an HVAC company it mostly means a real named owner, a real address, real reviews, and content written by someone who has actually done the work.
Advertising where you pay each time someone clicks, whether or not they call. HVAC clicks are among the most expensive in local services, because every company is bidding on the same emergency moment.
Go deeper →What one click costs you. An auction sets it, not you, and it peaks in exactly the weeks you're busiest.
Go deeper →A list telling Google which searches should not trigger your ads. Without one, you're paying for "HVAC technician salary" and "HVAC school near me."
Go deeper →A platform that sells homeowner contact info, usually to several companies at once. You pay per contact, win or lose the job. Useful for bridging a slow schedule when you're new. Expensive as a permanent plan, because the rent rises and the brand you're building is theirs.
Go deeper →Money a manufacturer reimburses you for local advertising, usually accrued as a percentage of what you bought from them. It is earned on past purchases, so it is predictable. Claiming it takes preapproval and paperwork, which is why so much of it expires every year.
Go deeper →Advertising money a manufacturer awards ahead of sales for a specific push, rather than earned on what you already bought. Discretionary, and not guaranteed year to year. Worth knowing which one you have, because co-op you can plan around and MDF you cannot.
Go deeper →Total spend divided by jobs actually booked. The only advertising number that means anything. Clicks, impressions, and click-through rate are weather. This is climate.
Go deeper →A system that tells you which calls came from where. Necessary because HVAC is a phone business, and most of your calls never touch a form on a website.
The free performance data inside your Google Business Profile: calls, direction requests, website taps, and the searches that found you. It's the only measurement tool on this page that costs nothing, and most owners have never opened it.
Go deeper →Swapping the phone number shown on your website depending on how the visitor arrived, so calls get credited correctly. One rule: it belongs on your website and your ads, never on your Google listing or directories, or you break your NAP consistency.
See NAP consistency →Knowing which marketing produced which call. Without it you're guessing, and guessing is how companies keep paying for the thing that isn't working.
An estimate of what your current search visibility would cost to buy with ads instead. Useful for comparing you to a competitor. Always an estimate, always from a named tool, never a promise.
Searches for your company by name, rather than for a service. It is the closest thing to demand you are not renting, it shows up free in Search Console, and it is one of the first things a buyer checks if you ever sell.
Go deeper →What you add on top of your cost. A 50% markup means multiplying by 1.5. It is not the same thing as margin, and treating the two as interchangeable is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in the trade.
Go deeper →What you keep out of a price after the direct costs of doing the job. Multiply cost by 1.5 and you have a 50% markup but only a 33% margin. To hit a target margin, divide your cost by one minus that margin.
Go deeper →What is left after everything, including overhead and your own pay. Published targets for HVAC run from 8% to 25% depending on who is publishing and what they sell. Sitting persistently under 8% usually means the price book is out of date.
Go deeper →What an hour of a technician's time actually costs you: wage, payroll taxes, workers compensation, benefits, truck, tools, and a share of overhead, divided by billable hours rather than paid hours. Always larger than owners expect, and every price in the book sits on it.
Go deeper →A fixed price for a defined repair, quoted from a book before the work starts rather than billed by the hour. The customer knows the total up front, and a fast technician stops costing you money. You carry the risk when a job runs long.
Go deeper →The list your technicians quote from, with a set price for each common repair. Most residential revenue runs through a few dozen repair types, so the book does not have to cover everything to be worth building. Rebuild it whenever your costs move.
Go deeper →What you charge to send a licensed technician out and tell the homeowner what is wrong, whether or not they buy the repair. It is a filter, not a revenue line. Applying it toward the repair is normal. Waiving it on the phone is not the same thing.
Go deeper →A yearly plan where a homeowner pays for scheduled visits, priority scheduling, and usually a repair discount. Two visits a year is the floor. It fills your spring and fall before the weather does, and it is the biggest single thing a buyer looks at if you ever sell.
Go deeper →The promise that plan customers get seen first when everybody is calling at once. It is what homeowners actually buy, more than the discount. Define it in writing, same day or next day, because a vague promise becomes a broken one in July.
Go deeper →Of the service calls you ran, the share that ended with a signed agreement. ACCA puts the benchmark at a minimum of 25% for service technicians. It tells you whether your team is asking at all, which is usually the whole problem.
Go deeper →Of the agreements that came up for renewal, the share that renewed. Forty came due, thirty-two renewed, that is 80%. Almost nobody tracks it, and it is among the first numbers a buyer asks for. Below 70%, the problem is delivery rather than selling.
Go deeper →Money that arrives on a schedule instead of when something breaks. For an HVAC company that is mostly the agreement book. Emergency calls are weather. Recurring revenue is a calendar, and buyers pay a premium for a calendar.
Go deeper →A homeowner sent to you by an equipment maker's dealer locator, like Trane Comfort Specialist or Carrier Factory Authorized. They arrive with the decision half made. The locator only sends what it can find, so a half-finished dealer profile hands those calls to somebody else.
Go deeper →Whether your email actually lands in the inbox instead of the spam folder. It is invisible until the whole program quietly stops working. It is decided by authentication, list hygiene, and how many people mark you as spam, not by what you wrote.
Go deeper →A record in your domain settings listing which servers are allowed to send email as your company. Without it, mail providers have no way to tell your tune-up reminder from someone pretending to be you. A one-time setup for whoever manages your domain.
Go deeper →A digital signature attached to every message you send, proving it really came from your domain and was not altered on the way. Set up once alongside SPF. Providers then check it on every message you ever send, without you doing anything.
Go deeper →The policy record telling mail providers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails. It ties the other two together, and it is the one Google and Yahoo actually require of high-volume senders. Publishing even a basic version beats having none.
Go deeper →Sending different messages to different parts of your list based on what you already know. Heat pump owners get one note, boiler owners get another. Your software has the equipment records. Not using them is the difference between a reminder and junk mail.
Go deeper →The share of recipients recorded as opening an email. The number is broken. Apple pre-loads images the moment mail arrives, which registers as an open nobody made, inflating the figure by 15 to 20 points. Watch clicks, replies, and booked jobs instead.
Go deeper →The share of inbound calls nobody answered. Your phone system can export it in about ten minutes. Published figures for HVAC run anywhere from 20% to 62%, and nearly all of them come from companies selling answering services, so measure your own rather than borrowing a number.
Go deeper →How fast somebody reaches a caller or returns a message. It decides more than the wording of the message does, because a callback an hour later is competing against the shop that answered live. Measure it in minutes, not in good intentions.
Go deeper →The person answering your phone and booking the work. In a shop your size it is the highest-leverage seat in the building, because everything you spend on being found arrives here first and either turns into a job or does not.
Go deeper →A service that picks up when your own line is busy, closed, or slammed, rather than replacing your office. For most shops of five to twenty people this is the right shape: your person handles the calls needing judgment, the service catches the rest.
Go deeper →A state rule requiring everyone on a call to agree before it can be recorded. Maryland is one, and a violation is a felony rather than a civil matter. DC and Virginia require only one party. Ask any answering or tracking vendor whether recording is on by default.
Go deeper →The license that authorizes plumbing work, and the person a company must have on record to perform it. In Maryland the ladder runs six years at minimum: four as an apprentice plus 7,500 hours, then two more years and another 3,750. Nobody trains their way there quickly.
Go deeper →A license authorizing natural gas work rather than full plumbing. Worth knowing because Maryland lists a master natural gas fitter route for holders of an HVACR master license, which makes it the shortest legitimate expansion for a shop that already holds one.
Go deeper →The authority a company holds to perform licensed work, as distinct from the individual license a person holds. It usually rests on one designated master on record, which means if that person leaves, the company's authority to do the work can leave with him.
Go deeper →Net profit, plus your salary, plus the personal expenses you legitimately run through the company. It assumes the buyer is one person who will do your job, which is why it is the number used to price smaller owner-operated shops.
Go deeper →Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It strips out financing and tax choices, and it assumes a hired manager runs the place at market pay. Once you have a management layer, this is the number buyers use instead of SDE.
Go deeper →Earnings times the multiple. It is the headline number, the one that gets repeated at the supply house counter, and it is not what you take home. What the business owes comes off it before anything reaches you.
Go deeper →Enterprise value minus what the business owes. This is the part that actually belongs to you, and it is still not the check. Escrow, seller notes, earnouts, and rollover all come out of it before closing.
Go deeper →How much the business needs you personally in order to run. Published analysis puts the discount at 15% to 25% of value when the answer is a lot. The fastest test costs nothing: leave for a week and see what happens.
Go deeper →The share of your sale price you keep as a stake in the buyer's company instead of taking in cash. Common at the large platforms, typically 10% to 30% depending on the source. It pays out when they sell again, which makes it a bet on somebody else's work.
Go deeper →Part of your price held back and paid later, and only if the business hits agreed targets. It shows up when one customer is too large a share of revenue, or when you plan to leave quickly. In practice you are financing part of your own sale.
Go deeper →The first company an investment group buys in a market. It has to stand on its own with its own management, so it earns the highest multiples and the press releases. Yours is almost certainly not one, and that is fine.
Go deeper →A smaller company bought to plug into a platform the buyer already owns. Most independent HVAC sales are these. You are worth more to a group already operating in your county than to one trying to get into it.
Go deeper →The accounting review a serious buyer runs on your books before closing. Every add-back without a paper trail gets rejected, and every rejection comes straight off the earnings number your multiple is applied to.
Go deeper →No terms match that. Try a shorter word. Or ask us and we'll add it.
Ask us. If we can't explain it in a sentence you'd repeat to a customer, it probably isn't worth paying for.
And if you want to see these terms applied to your actual company, the free visibility audit puts real numbers next to most of them: where you rank in every town you serve, what your visibility is worth, and whether AI tools name you or your competitor.