Why it matters on an HVAC site
HVAC review flow is seasonal by nature, because the work is. A steady four a month through a mild spring and twenty in a heatwave is a normal pattern for a real business.
The pattern that looks wrong is a flat line followed by a spike: nothing for two years, then ninety reviews in three weeks. That is the shape of a campaign rather than a business, and it is visible to anybody who scrolls the dates.
How to check it yourself
- Plot review dates as a monthly series rather than quoting the total, for the business and for the ranking set.
- Compare the rate against the number of jobs completed, since reviews per job is the figure that shows whether the process works.
- Track the owner response rate and lag alongside it.
Worked through in numbers
A contractor has 312 reviews at 4.8 and reports reviews as handled.
Plotted by month, 280 of the 312 arrived in a single eleven-week window in 2023, when an agency ran a campaign against the back catalogue. The rate since is 1.4 a month against roughly 180 jobs a month.
The total was healthy and the process did not exist. Asking at the point of completion took it to 19 a month, which is where the competitor with 41 fewer total reviews had been sitting all along.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Local SEO. The rate reviews arrive, which reads differently from the total.