Search for air conditioning in Las Vegas and count what sits above the first ordinary result. Three paid adverts. Then a map with five companies pinned to it. Then Yelp, then Angi. A company can hold the top ordinary position on that page and still be the fifth thing the customer sees. We captured it on 18 September 2026, with the location set to Las Vegas and personalisation off.
Search "ac repair las vegas" the same afternoon and the page changes shape again: two separate advert blocks, and Yelp appearing twice. Which of those two phrases you are found for decides how much of the page you are actually reaching, and the phrase most companies chase is usually the one with the most bought above it.
The field is larger than the page suggests, and larger than the official count admits. The US Census records 111,207 employer establishments nationally and 631 in the Las Vegas metro, on County Business Patterns 2023 under code 238220. That code covers plumbing and air conditioning together, so it is not HVAC alone and we are not going to present it as though it were. Beneath it sits a second population the employer count misses entirely: 178,663 owner-operator shops with no payroll, about 1.6 for every employer establishment.
Those companies are not spread evenly. California holds 11,686 of them, Florida 9,353, Texas 8,966, New York 7,061 and Pennsylvania 4,154. Five states hold roughly 37 per cent of the country between them, and California alone holds about 11 per cent. If you are in one of them you are working a crowded page; if you are not, the field is thinner than the national figure suggests. The same caveat applies to every one of those numbers: the code counts plumbing and air conditioning together.
So the arithmetic of the page is this. Several hundred licensed companies in a metro, a great many more sole operators, five places in the map block, and ten ordinary results of which two are already taken by directories.
Search results captured 18 September 2026, location set to Las Vegas, personalisation off. Establishment counts: US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, file cbp23st, retrieved 18 September 2026, NAICS 238220 on the 2017 vintage, plus Nonemployer Statistics 2023. NAICS 238220 is "Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors", so none of these figures is air conditioning alone. No HVAC-only metro or state figure appears here, because the federal code does not separate the trades.
The national figure is intimidating and mostly irrelevant. What matters is the handful of companies inside your radius who have done the unglamorous work, and in most markets that is a small number.
Two things follow from the structure of this trade. The first is that the nonemployer population, all those one-person operations, competes for the same searches but rarely competes for the same positions. They do not have the citations, the review volume or the site to hold a map place, so the field you are actually fighting is smaller than the count implies.
The second is that the companies who do hold those positions have usually held them for years, and they hold them on assets rather than effort: an old domain, a long review history, citations that have been consistent since before anyone thought about it. That is why the audit measures those things before we quote, and why we can tell you whether page one in your market is a six month job or a twelve month one before you spend anything.
In both of the searches we captured, a directory held a place in the top ten. Yelp in both, Angi in one. Those sites are not competitors in the ordinary sense. They do not fix air conditioning. They rank, collect the enquiry, and sell it on, sometimes to you.
Here is what that market looks like from inside. A shared HVAC lead runs roughly $25 to $120 depending on the platform and the market, and it is sold to between three and eight contractors at the same time. Angi charges around $300 a year in membership before a single lead arrives, plus a deposit typically between $300 and $1,500, on a twelve month contract with a termination penalty on the balance. The homeowner receives several calls within minutes, and the first to call wins roughly half the time.
Nobody publishes a rate card. Not Angi, not HomeAdvisor, not Thumbtack, for any trade. The one firm public number is Angi's own: average revenue per service request of $73.81 in the fourth quarter of 2024. Worth knowing too that Angi absorbed both HomeAdvisor and CraftJack, so two of the directories competing with you in the results are the same company.
The number that decides whether any of this is worth it is not the lead price but what a booked job costs once close rates are applied. Reported figures put a booked job through Angi at around $542, through Google's Local Services Ads at roughly $168 to $190, and through owned channels at $100 to $200 once rankings and reviews are established, which takes about a year. Shared marketplace leads are reported to close at 9 to 22 per cent; exclusive ones at 38 to 44.
We are not going to tell you never to buy a lead. We are going to tell you what the alternative costs, and that the alternative keeps working after you stop paying for it.
lead economics from published industry analyses read 19 September 2026, quoted as ranges because sources disagree and no marketplace publishes pricing. Angi's revenue per service request is the company's own reported figure for Q4 2024.
In a licensed trade, part of what belongs on the page is not a marketing decision. Get this wrong and a page that ranks has cost you more than it earned.
Take Nevada, where our own office is. All advertising by a licensed contractor must include the company name and the contractor's licence number, and the State Contractors Board names the website explicitly among the places it has to appear. NRS 624.720(4). The same statute defines advertising broadly enough to include the Internet and directory listings under a contractor heading, so the number has to match on your Yelp and Angi profiles too. A number that is right on the website and wrong on a directory is still wrong.
It is also unlawful to publish a false or misleading statement of material fact intended to induce someone to use your services. NRS 624.720(3). Response times, savings claims and "we beat any quote" all have to be supportable, which rules out a good deal of the copy currently sitting on competitor sites. And heating and air conditioning work requires a licence regardless of the small-repair threshold, so an HVAC site cannot lean on handyman framing.
Other states are stricter, and some are stricter in ways that surprise people. We check yours before we write a word of your page.
NRS 624.720(4), 624.720(3) and 624.720(7)(a), and the Nevada State Contractors Board advertising requirements page and FAQ Central, read 18 and 19 September 2026.
What an HVAC page has to say changes at the state line, and not by a little.
Arizona. The Registrar of Contractors has published what prominent display of a licence number means, and it is stricter than most operators expect: directly on the home page, clearly visible rather than hidden behind photographs, in an appropriately sized font, and not in the footer. The footer is exactly where almost every Arizona contractor site puts it.
Oregon. The Construction Contractors Board requires the number on the website and specifies the format, CCB followed by the number. Oregon also regulates the claim itself: you may not say you are licensed, bonded or insured unless you hold a current licence. Its neighbour California takes the opposite position and bans the bonding claim outright.
Texas. TDLR licenses air conditioning and refrigeration contractors, and all advertising designed to solicit business must carry the affiliated licensee's number. Four exemptions exist and none of them covers a website. The penalty for omitting it is published: $500 to $1,000.
Minnesota. The statute enumerates websites and Internet ads in a list rather than leaving it to interpretation, so there is no argument in this state about whether the site counts.
Maryland. The home improvement rules reach into how the offer appears. A coupon advert may not require the coupon before an estimate is given, and an advertised price that excludes delivery or installation must say so conspicuously.
Nevada. Covered above: the number on the site, matching across directories, and no claim that cannot be supported.
The first difficulty in this trade is that the decision happens on the map rather than on your website. In every search we captured, the map block sat above the first ordinary result, and the map is fed by a Google Business Profile rather than by your site. Most HVAC companies filled that profile in once, when somebody set it up, and have not touched it since. A good website does not fix it, which is why buying a new site and expecting the phone to ring is the most common expensive mistake in this trade.
The second is that your busiest phrase is your most expensive. "hvac las vegas" carried three paid adverts above everything else; "ac repair las vegas", captured the same afternoon, carried two advert blocks and Yelp twice. Chasing only the obvious phrase means competing for the part of the page with the least room on it, while the specific repair phrases beside it go unclaimed by anyone.
Here at SEO Guarantee, we provide you with a full suite of SEO services:
Nothing here is a surprise, and none of it starts before you have agreed to it.
First we measure your market: who holds the map and the ordinary results for your phrases today, how old their domains are, what links and citations they carry, and how strong their authority is. That is the audit, and it is what decides whether page one in your market is a six month job or a twelve month one.
Then we propose the key phrases and you approve every one before any work begins. No list handed to you afterwards, and no phrases chosen because they happened to be easy to win.
Then the technical pass on the site and the profile, which is where most of the early movement comes from, because most of it is correcting things that are simply wrong. Then the first measurement, so there is a number to compare against rather than an impression.
Most agencies sell you the search work and leave the website to whoever built it. When the rankings do not move, the agency says the site is the problem and the developer says the SEO is, and both are partly right.
We do the search work, the website and the conversion work in one house, under one contract, with nothing outsourced. That is not a convenience argument. An agency that does not control the site cannot promise what the site will do, so it promises effort instead: hours logged, reports sent, rankings trending. Controlling all of it is what makes a number in a contract possible.
There is no fixed price list here, and an agency with one is quoting before it has looked at your business. What your market takes depends on how old your domain is, what links and citations you already have, and who is holding the positions you want today. That is what the audit measures, and it is why every engagement is scoped to what your business actually needs rather than to a tier somebody wrote in advance.
Then the guarantee: we propose the key phrases, you approve every one before work starts, and the contract covers up to half of them reaching the first page within six or twelve months depending on the agreement. We only make the offer after the audit, and only to businesses we can actually get there. If that is not you, we would rather say so than take the money.
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The work is the same discipline wherever you are: what page one holds in your metro, who is holding it, and what it takes to get past them. What changes is the answer. A Las Vegas market with 631 plumbing and air conditioning establishments and five map places is not the market a company in Boise is working, and as the section above shows, the rules change at the state line as well.
There is no fixed price list. What your market takes depends on your domain, the links and citations you already have, and who holds the map today. You get the number after the audit.
In most states, yes, and in several the rule names the website specifically. In Arizona it may not sit in the footer. In Nevada it must also match your directory profiles. We check the rule for your state before we write the page.
No, and be careful with anyone who does. Nobody controls the exact position of a result, and in local search two people in different parts of the same city see different maps. Page one is something we can work to and measure against.
Often, as a bridge. What matters is knowing the real cost: a shared lead is sold to several contractors at once, so the price you pay per booked job is several times the price on the invoice. Run both, measure cost per booked job rather than cost per lead, and shift the spend as the owned channel starts producing.
