Bertie Heating & Air had served Gainesville since 1991, but none of that reputation showed up online. We published results at 30 days and again at 60. This is the four-month check: what held, what grew, and what a full summer on GrowthOS Local Lighthouse produced.
Bertie Heating & Air Conditioning has served Gainesville and North Central Florida since 1991. Family-owned, three generations deep, with an owner who has 51 years in the trade and a real differentiator: a load calculation on every single job. None of that was reaching customers online.
Organic traffic had fallen every month for six straight months, down roughly 74% from January to June 2026, while the strongest local competitor held nearly steady. The problem was the site, not the market.
The website was an aging WordPress install on slow shared hosting, with 62 ranked keywords and shrinking. And there was zero Google map-pack visibility on money searches like "ac repair near me" in a market where the top rival holds a 4.8-star profile with more than 600 reviews.
On June 3 we took over the Google Business Profile and launched the GrowthOS Local Lighthouse program. The first optimized post went live June 4. The rebuilt website followed on July 2. Four months in, both engines are running, and Google Ads joined them in late September.
Walkthrough and onboarding calls surfaced the real story: three generations, 35 years, load-calc-on-every-job, an educator's approach. Every claim on the new site was owner-verified. No invented reviews, no fake badges, no promises the company doesn't make.
Page-level teardown of the top three competitors, real keyword volumes and difficulty, and a 15-topic content plan mapped to how Gainesville actually searches.
130 pages planned, each with an assigned target keyword, H1, and meta data written before a single line of code.
A modern static site on edge hosting replaced the slow shared-hosting WordPress. Mobile-first, three rounds of client edits folded in, lead form wired straight into the CRM, every template audited to WCAG 2.2 AA.
DNS cutover with email untouched and old URLs 301-redirected, so nothing that was ranking got lost.
Full profile optimization, monthly rank-grid scans across 10 revenue keywords, and a publishing engine that never stops: SEO posts multiple times per week, geotagged keyword-named photos, video, drafted owner replies to every review, review requests via QR and link, and citations synced across 51 directories.
A 169-point rank grid across the Gainesville service area, June 3 baseline vs the October 2 scan. Average map rank moved from 7.7 to 6.1, a 21% improvement, and all 10 tracked keywords rank better than they did in June. The number of grid points where Bertie holds the #1 map spot grew from 105 to 145.
| Keyword | Rank before | Rank at 60 days | Rank at 4 months | Top-3 before | Top-3 at 4 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| air conditioner repair | 5.0 | 4.5 | 4.2 | 46% | 56% |
| air conditioning repair near me | 6.1 | 4.6 | 5.1 | 40% | 50% |
| hvac repair | 6.3 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 39% | 46% |
| air conditioning repair | 6.8 | 5.3 | 5.1 | 31% | 41% |
| ac repair | 6.8 | 5.1 | 5.9 | 32% | 36% |
| ac maintenance service | 7.3 | 5.4 | 6.4 | 27% | 27% |
| ac repair service | 8.7 | 6.5 | 6.6 | 24% | 29% |
| ac tune up | 9.5 | 7.1 | 8.5 | 8% | 4% |
| residential hvac repair | 9.9 | 7.1 | 7.6 | 4% | 5% |
| home ac repair | 10.4 | 8.3 | 7.1 | 1% | 10% |
"Top-3 coverage" is the share of the service-area grid where Bertie appears in Google's map pack (positions 1–3). Eight of ten keywords cover more of the map than they did in June. "Home ac repair" went from 1% to 10% coverage, and "air conditioner repair" now holds the top three across more than half the service area. Some terms gave back a few tenths since the August scan; none has fallen back to its starting point.
Phone calls and website clicks straight from the Google Business Profile, by calendar month. April and May are the last two full months before the June 3 takeover. For an HVAC company, calls are booked jobs.
| Month | Phone calls from profile | Website clicks from profile | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 84 | 36 | Before takeover |
| May 2026 | 76 | 39 | Before takeover |
| June 2026 | 124 | 63 | Profile takeover June 3 |
| July 2026 | 129 | 81 | New website live July 2 |
| August 2026 | 121 | 68 | |
| September 2026 | 80 | 52 | Cooling season winds down |
| Monthly average | 80 → 114 (+42%) | 38 → 66 (+76%) | Spring vs June–September |
Summer is busy season for any Florida HVAC company, so we checked the same four months against last year too. June through September calls and website clicks combined are up 5% on 2025, and profile website clicks beat last year by 26% in August and 41% in September. Google reports profile activity on a delay of about a week.
The rebuilt 130-page site went live July 2. In its first 96 days Google served it 47,852 search impressions and 285 organic clicks. The company name ranks #1, and non-brand searches like "hvac gainesville fl" and "air conditioner repair gainesville fl" now land on page one.
The old site had no Search Console history to compare against, so these are absolute numbers, not growth claims.
One month after launch, we asked the owner of Bertie Heating & Air what has actually changed. No script, no editing. Just his answer, recorded at the shop. We asked about:
Bertie now appears in AI assistant answers on 9 of the 10 tracked searches, and in the top three on 7 of them. Two months ago its best ChatGPT spot was #2.
All ten map rankings above their June starting point. 718 calls and website clicks from the profile in four months. A fast, owner-approved website at bertieair.com that Google has shown nearly 48,000 times. And the AI assistants homeowners are starting to ask now name Bertie first.
The first month proved the profile work. The second proved it sticks. The fourth proved it holds when the summer rush ends. This is what four months of local SEO looks like.
Book a free visibility audit. We'll show you exactly where you stand in the map pack today and what it would take to own your local market.