Heating contractor finds 11 fixes and its first AI citations

Situation

A heating and plumbing contractor in Eschborn, 22 staff, revenue of about €3 million a year, most of it from heat pump installations and maintenance contracts within 25 km. The website had 140 pages, built by a local agency in 2019 and extended piecemeal since. Rankings for “Wärmepumpe Eschborn” and similar terms had slipped from page one to page two over the previous year. The owner had also noticed that when he asked ChatGPT or Perplexity for heating installers near Eschborn, his firm never came up, while two competitors from Frankfurt did. He wanted to know what was wrong and what to fix first, without a monthly retainer.

Approach

Two pieces of work, quoted together at €3,800. First, the technical review: we crawled all 140 pages and checked indexing, page speed, broken links, duplicate titles, structured data and mobile rendering. That produced 38 issues, which we sorted into 11 priority fixes, 15 to do when convenient and 12 to ignore. Each priority fix came with a one-line instruction the agency could act on. Second, the GEO baseline: we wrote 25 prompts a real customer in the area would type into an AI answer engine (“Wer installiert Wärmepumpen in Eschborn?”, “heating maintenance contract Main-Taunus-Kreis”), ran each through the major AI answer engines, and recorded whether the firm was named, which competitors were named, and which sources the engines cited. The baseline listed the six sources the engines relied on most and which of those the firm could realistically appear in.

Result

In this scenario the firm was cited in 2 of the 25 prompts at baseline, both for maintenance. The agency worked through the 11 priority fixes in six weeks: an indexing block on the service pages, 23 duplicate title tags, a 4-second render delay on mobile and missing local business markup. We re-ran the 25 prompts after three months. The firm was now cited in 8 of 25, including four installation prompts. Organic clicks from Google Search rose from about 620 to about 900 a month over the same period, according to Search Console. Two of the six sources the engines relied on now list the firm, after the owner submitted the entries himself.

What it cost

€3,800 as a fixed price, quoted before the work started: €1,900 for the technical review and €1,900 for the GEO baseline. That covered the crawl of up to 500 pages, the prioritised fix list, the 25 tracked prompts and the source analysis. The standard review at €4,500 would have added a multilingual site, five competitors crawled and deeper Core Web Vitals work, which a single-language local site did not need. Ongoing monitoring from €1,200 a month was offered and declined for now. The work is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery, and for a monthly programme the first month is refundable in full.

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