Case Study: 0 → 342 Ranked Keywords in 90 Days for Kendrick Heating & Air

When Kendrick Heating & Air — a family-owned, SMUD Top Performing HVAC contractor serving the greater Sacramento region — partnered with LeadButler, they had a strong reputation in the field (California license #891246, a verified 5.0 customer rating) and almost zero digital footprint to match it. No ranking keywords. No organic traffic. No conversion infrastructure. 90 days later, the same business is ranking for 342 keywords, capturing an estimated $893/mo in organic search value, and sweeping Top-3 positions across the Auburn heat-pump cluster.

This is the full breakdown of what we built, what we changed, and the numbers that came out the other side. If you want the underlying methodology, it's the same playbook we lay out in our HVAC marketing guide and our how to get HVAC leads breakdown — Kendrick is just what it looks like when an owner actually executes it.

The client

Kendrick Heating & Air serves Auburn, Folsom, Rocklin, Roseville, Citrus Heights, Granite Bay, Elk Grove, and Sacramento. Family-owned, fully licensed, SMUD Top Performing Contractor, 5.0-star rating. LeadButler was engaged to rebuild their digital presence from scratch — modern site, conversion infrastructure, and ongoing SEO/AEO growth.

What we built

The new kendrickhvac.com ships on a modern Vite + React 18 + TypeScript stack with Tailwind CSS on a fully tokenized HSL design system — Kendrick Blue (#0066CC), Heating Red (#CC0000), Comfort Green (#00AA44), and a DM Sans + Inter type pairing. shadcn/ui on Radix primitives, TanStack React Query for the data layer, React Router v6 for navigation, and Cloud (managed Postgres, auth, edge functions, storage) for the backend.

• ~38 routes total: homepage, services hub, 10+ city-level service-area pages, dedicated landers for AC repair / installation / heat pumps / furnaces / mini-splits, reviews, financing, specials, blog, contact, and an internal admin lead console.
• Security: DOMPurify for XSS, Supabase RLS on every public table, rate-limited lead endpoints, role-based admin via the user_roles security-definer pattern.
• Forms & validation: React Hook Form + Zod with triple-redundant lead delivery to three internal inboxes.
• Media: video hosted on Vimeo (never self-hosted), images optimized and lazy-loaded for Core Web Vitals.
• Integrations: ServiceTitan for booking + CRM lead routing, GA4 + GTM for full conversion tracking, Google / Yelp / Facebook / Nextdoor for reviews.

The SEO/AEO foundation

Every page ships with per-page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, OpenGraph, and JSON-LD LocalBusiness + Service schema. Sitemap and robots are clean, every page has one H1, alt text is disciplined. Content is tuned for AI search (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini) with direct-answer blocks, FAQ schema, and citation-friendly formatting. The bet was simple: do the boring on-page work correctly on dozens of pages and let it compound.

The 90-day SEO results

Pulled from Semrush (US database, June 4, 2026):

• Organic keywords ranking: 342 (up from 0 at launch)
• Estimated monthly organic traffic: ~195 visits (up from 0)
• Estimated monthly organic value: ~$893 (up from $0)
• Total backlinks: 446 from 185 referring domains
• Authority Score: 16/100 and climbing

0 → 342 ranking keywords in 90 days. From $0 to ~$900/month in estimated organic value — without a dollar of paid ads.

The keyword trendline

The compounding curve is the story. Feb 15: 0 keywords, $0 value. Mar 15: 54 keywords, $0 value. Apr 15: 182 keywords, $544/mo. May 15: 331 keywords, $807/mo. Today: 342 keywords, $893/mo. The site went from invisible to ranking for hundreds of commercial-intent searches in roughly one quarter.

Top-ranking keywords

• kendrick heating and air — Position 1 (140 searches/mo)
• kendrick heating and air reviews — Position 2
• furnace installation auburn ca — Position 2
• heat pump installation / repair / service / replacement auburn ca — Position 3 across the full cluster
• furnace service rocklin ca — Position 3
• trusted hvac technicians sacramento — Position 4
• hvac repair folsom — Position 5
• ac repair citrus heights — Position 6
• hvac services auburn — Position 6

The city-page strategy is the engine

The top-performing pages tell you exactly what worked. The Auburn service-area page alone is now competing for 22 commercial-intent keywords. Folsom: 18 keywords. Then Citrus Heights, Rocklin, and Roseville. The homepage drives 60% of organic traffic on 16 keywords — but the city pages are the moat. This is the exact strategy we recommend in our HVAC lead generation breakdown: one unique, deeply optimized page per city × service, not one generic 'service areas' page with a list of towns.

On-site traffic growth

Source: Project Analytics, March 6 – June 4, 2026. 2,715 visitors, 4,553 pageviews, 1.68 pages per visit. The 30-day buckets — 1,219 → 696 → 800 — show the seasonal HVAC dip between heating and cooling season, followed by a +15% rebound as cooling-season search demand returned. Organic now contributes a meaningfully larger share of that traffic than at launch, because the ranked-keyword footprint grew roughly 6× in the same window.

Why this matters for other HVAC owners

Kendrick didn't have a marketing problem. They had a marketing-infrastructure problem — no modern site, no city-page strategy, no conversion tracking, no CRM-attached lead routing. The fix was building the infrastructure once and letting it compound. The same approach works in any market with multiple suburbs and a brand owner willing to invest in the boring on-page work for 90 days.

If you're an HVAC owner thinking about your own version of this, the speed-to-lead playbook is what we'd run on top of this exact site to turn that 195 organic visits/mo into booked jobs — and our best HVAC lead generation companies page lines up how LeadButler compares to the alternatives.

Credit

Built and marketed by LeadButler for Kendrick Heating & Air, a Sacramento HVAC contractor. Want results like these in your market? Book a demo and we'll map out what the same engine would look like for your business.