HVAC Website Migration Case Study: Risks of Moving Without an SEO Specialist

Initially, the migration seemed successful: traffic on the old HVAC website began to decline, while traffic on the new website started to grow. However, after a few months of growth, the traffic began to drop until it eventually fell to zero.

At the beginning, the HVAC website gained more and more traffic, but after some time, it started to fall down

The pages on the new site either were not ranked for relevant keywords or occupied positions no better than in the TOP-90.

After conducting a full technical analysis of the HVAC website, we discovered many problems, the main ones being:

• Duplicate pages,
• A large number of junk pages that were neither closed off from indexing nor scanning,
• Lack of canonical tags,
• Absence of unique meta tags on traffic-generating pages, etc.
• Technical issues affecting the crawling and indexing of key HVAC service pages.

Our primary efforts focused on fixing technical errors first. Together with the client’s developers, we addressed the problems that were preventing Google from properly crawling, indexing, and ranking the new HVAC website.

Additionally, we started working on On-Page optimization:

• Created meta tag templates for key website pages,
• Provided recommendations to improve the site’s usability,
• Offered suggestions to enhance the internal linking structure,
• Began optimizing content on HVAC service pages to better target relevant search queries,
• Improved the structure and content of important service pages.

Furthermore, we actively worked on a link-building strategy, obtaining at least 10 quality backlinks from various donor sites each month.

Interestingly, another source of traffic for this site became Reddit. The client actively used this forum to promote their brand, which even helped us secure a few bookings.

We continued working on the HVAC website’s technical SEO and backlink profile while optimizing the pages responsible for generating organic visibility.

It took approximately 7 months for the website to begin appearing in search results again at a meaningful level.

After the December Core Update 2024, we saw that our efforts were not in vain— the number of pages in search results and the site’s rankings began to rise sharply. As of January 2025, in less than a month, we have gained +2620 keywords in search results and +113,423 impressions.

The screenshot above shows the number of keywords the website got within less than a month

Results from GSC for about 20 days

Netrocket has successfully resolved issues and implemented strategic optimizations to smooth this migration and recover the organic traffic after Google’s update.

This case clearly illustrates that significant changes to an HVAC website, especially a domain or website migration, can have a major impact on organic rankings, traffic, and lead generation when SEO is not properly managed.

Without an experienced SEO expert for HVAC companies, a migration can result in lost rankings, reduced visibility for important service and location keywords, and ultimately fewer calls and leads. Recovering lost organic traffic can require significant time and resources.

That’s why we do not recommend managing the migration on your own.

For this client, we are continuing to develop the site, optimize traffic- and lead-generating HVAC service pages, strengthen the backlink profile, and further improve the site’s technical and on-page SEO.