Local SEO that actually ships: an HVAC case study

Small-business SEO is rarely about clever tricks. For a local HVAC contractor it came down to three unglamorous things done thoroughly: one page per city they serve, correct structured data on every page, and a site that isn't crippled by its own images.

I built nine landing pages — eight cities plus a hub — each with city-specific copy, a map, and HVACBusiness JSON-LD carrying the right geo coordinates and service catalog. All of it pushed through the WordPress REST API with scripts, so it was repeatable and auditable.

Performance was the quiet win: 30 oversized images, compressed locally and swapped in via the API with backups, cut 82% of the image weight. The lesson — measure, back up, automate, verify.