SEO case study: how an HVAC installer near Paris reached the top of Google

This SEO case study follows one client, Pilotech, an air conditioning installer near Paris, from the day its WordPress site was hacked to the day its main site reached the first two results on Google. I have worked with Pilotech every month for two years now, on SEO, websites and cold emailing, so I can give you the order of the work, the timeline and the results, including the part that did not work.

On a first call, people ask me the same three questions: do you have experience, what will SEO do for my business, and how long does it take to rank? This page answers them with one real project. Where I have a figure, I give it. Where I do not, I say so: a case study with invented precision is worth less than one with honest gaps.

This page is also the hub of my case studies. The other stories on this blog, from cold emailing to architects to an Airbnb concierge that made way for a business-to-business company, are linked near the end.

Pilotech’s SEO case study at a glance

The starting point: 5 to 10 calls a month

Pilotech advises on, installs and maintains air conditioning, heat pumps and ventilation. It sells under three lines: Teknopoint air conditioning with no outdoor unit, Toshiba air conditioning and heat pumps, and positive-input ventilation, known in France as VMI.

Teknopoint is the line at the heart of this case study. It is air conditioning from an Italian manufacturer that needs no unit on the façade, which suits the Paris buildings where an outdoor unit is not an option: Haussmann-era and listed buildings, protected areas, co-ownerships with strict rules. The people who need it know exactly what they are looking for, and they search for it in precise words.

Before I started, the business received 5 to 10 calls a month. That is the only figure I have from that period: I do not know what its traffic or its rankings were. I would love a fuller “before” column, and that gap is the first lesson of this case study.

How it started: a hacked WordPress site and an emergency call

The founder first heard about my work through a relative of mine. He liked a website I had built for someone else and wanted the same one for Pilotech. Then his old WordPress site was hacked, and he called me in an emergency: the site had to be recovered and a new one built, which I did.

I see this pattern often. So far, every client who has called me in an emergency was calling because of WordPress, and most of my WordPress clients who run their own site want to leave it: a steep learning curve, too many plugins to keep up to date, and changing one letter should never make the whole structure fall apart. If it has just happened to you, my guide on what to do when your WordPress site is hacked lists the first 24 hours in order.

I rebuilt Pilotech’s main site on Squarespace. The reason is practical: the founder can change a text or a photo himself, whenever he wants, without calling anyone and without breaking anything. I usually add a little custom code on top, and clients call me for that part.

Squarespace has one real drawback for SEO: it is a closed platform, with no access to the source code, so on paper a custom-coded site has more room to rank. This one still ranks first or second, and the next section shows the work behind it. My full comparison of the two platforms is in Squarespace vs WordPress.

What I did, in order

The SEO work followed four steps, in this order: pages, content, the Google Business Profile, then technical fixes. Here is what each step covered.

1. Pages: one page for each thing people search for

Each Teknopoint range has its own page: ELFO, IDRA NEXT, IDRA NEXT RING, IDRA ECO, MOKA and PICCOLO, in single-room and multi-room versions where both exist. Each page shows what the range leaves visible from the street, from two small grilles for ELFO to nothing at all for IDRA NEXT. For someone whose building rules out a unit on the façade, that is the deciding detail.

The site is in French, so the searches are too: people type phrases such as climatisation sans unité extérieure (air conditioning without an outdoor unit) and climatisation invisible (invisible air conditioning). The page titles and addresses carry those words. Finding the words your own clients type is the subject of my guide to keyword research for small businesses.

2. Content: answer the questions people ask before buying

Next came the content. The blog was written for the same searches as the pages, and it answers the questions people ask before they buy, such as how to hide an air conditioning unit. Articles like these catch the searches a product page cannot answer, then lead the reader to the right range.

Pilotech’s ventilation site later took the same approach further: 21 articles, each built around a concrete problem such as condensation or black mould, and each linking to the unit that solves it. If you want to do the same, start with how to write SEO blog posts that bring in enquiries.

3. The Google Business Profile

For a local installer, the Business Profile is the listing that shows on Google Maps and in the local results, often above the ordinary ones. Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence takes in your number of reviews and your rating (Google’s explanation). Nobody can pay Google for a better local position.

Pilotech’s reviews live on that profile, and its newer sites show them: the Toshiba site displays the Google rating at the top of every page, and quotes from the reviews on its home and about pages. If you are starting from zero, follow my Google Business Profile setup tutorial, then read my local SEO guide for town pages, reviews and the rest of local search.

4. Technical fixes

Technical fixes came last. On a Squarespace site, most of the technical side is settings rather than code: an SEO title and a description for every page, short page addresses, descriptions on images, redirects for old addresses and a sitemap submitted to Google Search Console. My Squarespace SEO tutorial goes through them one by one, and the on-page SEO checklist works on any platform.

Putting them last may look odd. On a small site, though, technical work polishes pages that already exist; it cannot make a page rank for a search it does not answer. So the pages and the words come first.

How long it took: from launch to the first lead

Here is the timeline, as precisely as I can give it:

That first ranking was unusually fast: SEO normally takes far longer. Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO, a video on its page Do you need an SEO?, talks about four months to a year in most cases.

What made it fast, in my view, was the offer. The site that ranked sells something very specific: one rare solution, searched in precise words, with pages that answer those words exactly. A broad offer is much harder to rank, as another of this founder’s sites showed (more on that below). For a normal timeline, stage by stage, read how long SEO takes.

The results: rankings, leads and better clients

Leads arrive in two ways: through the site’s forms and by phone. I do not know the closing rate, and I would rather tell you that than make one up. What I can say is that when a lead signs, it is often a very good client.

Three things surprised me along the way. First, the speed. Second, the quality of the leads, not only their number. Third, how good it is to work with this client: I have carte blanche, and he trusts me completely. That matters more than it sounds, because SEO rewards steady work month after month, not a project that stops at launch.

You can see the pages themselves on the Pilotech Teknopoint project page.

What did not work: the site that tried to sell everything

Not everything worked. Of the websites I have built for this founder, one did not work at all: it offered too many services and was too broad.

The same lesson played out at company level. Ginov, a sister company owned and run by the same founder, offered a long list of building trades under one roof: a catch-all. It closed while Pilotech, with one specific offer, took off. It is the clearest example I have of how much a focused offer, with SEO built around it, can change.

That contrast explains the founder’s choice of several websites, each focused on one line, rather than one site that says everything. The reason fits in a line: different audiences, sharper SEO for each, and it works. Today Teknopoint has the main site, Toshiba has a site of its own with a page for each of its ten ranges, and ventilation has its own site too, with seven unit pages and 21 articles. An entry portal and a unified site with 29 product sheets are built and ready to go live; the unified site’s copy was rewritten, not copied, so that it does not compete with the other sites in search.

Several sites are fine when each one serves its own audience with its own content. Doorway abuse is Google’s name for the opposite: near-identical sites or pages built only to catch more searches, which its spam policies forbid. The whole story, with Google’s rules, is in multiple websites for one business.

SEO and cold emailing: about ten prospects a day

SEO brings you the people who are already searching. Cold emailing reaches the ones who have not started searching yet. Pilotech uses both.

The cold email campaigns went to three audiences: Paris restaurants, Paris offices and shops, and architects. Architects were the main focus, and they were the ones who called most often. Each sequence had three plain-text emails at most, no links, the phone number in the email and an invitation to look at the catalogue on the website. In a year, the campaigns brought Pilotech 15 new clients.

Many architects called instead of replying. A call is quicker than a written answer, which gets buried under other emails, and people like talking to a human, so we made calling even easier. The full story is in my cold email case study; the cold email work itself runs through my sister brand, MLK Leadhunters.

Together, SEO and cold emailing now bring Pilotech about ten prospects a day. That figure belongs to both channels, and I do not credit it to SEO alone. The two also work as a pair: the emails invite people to look at the catalogue on the website, so the pages that rank on Google are also the pages a prospect from a cold email ends up reading.

When the leads outgrew the team

Success created a new problem. At some point there were more prospects than the team could handle, and the founder asked me to build an app so that nobody would forget to call a prospect back or answer a message.

I custom-coded an internal tool for the whole team. It manages prospects, jobs, communication with the employees, the calendar and accounting analytics, with AI and phone integrations. The lesson for any small business: when SEO works, the bottleneck moves from finding leads to answering them quickly.

Whether you need something bespoke or a standard tool is the subject of my guide to a bespoke CRM for a small business. If you are not there yet, you can already automate lead follow-up for free, with instant alerts and call-back reminders.

The other case studies on this blog

Pilotech is the longest story, not the only one. Each case study below answers a different question.

Eden Flats has one thing in common with Pilotech: its old website was hacked. Even before that, the site brought no leads, because the founder had too much to do to learn how SEO is done properly. After a new site, SEO and a new visual identity, owners started calling to have their properties managed. The founder then chose to focus on Eden Corporate Mobility, a corporate housing and mobility agency that takes less time and brings bigger cheques: a wise decision for someone running a business alone. The Eden Flats project page shows the site, including its town pages.

Two hacked sites, two rebuilds, two businesses that started getting calls. In both cases, the hack was the moment the business finally got the website it needed. The rest of my work is in the portfolio.

What you can copy for your own business

You do not need several websites or an internal app to apply this. Here is the checklist I would give any small business starting SEO:

1. Write down your starting point: calls and form enquiries per month, before you change anything.
2. Narrow what each page sells: one product or service per page, named the way your clients search for it. A broad site is what failed here.
3. Answer the questions people ask before buying, one article per real question, each linking to the page that answers it.
4. Complete your Google Business Profile and ask every client for a review.
5. Fix the technical basics last: titles, descriptions, page addresses and a sitemap.
6. Put the timeline in writing. On another project, a client refused to pay after six months because the results had not come yet. The lesson: agree in writing, before any work starts, what SEO can and cannot promise and how long it takes. On my side, I work on SEO for one to three months, then we review the results together and either agree a new plan or stop.
7. Plan for the leads: decide who answers the forms and the phone, and how fast, before they arrive.

You can do most of this yourself: my guide to small business SEO covers the method step by step. If you would rather hand it over, that is what my SEO service is for, and if your case does not need me, I will tell you so.