Your busiest week decides most of your year.
You cannot build a listing during the cold snap. By then the searches are already happening and the answer is whatever Google has on file.
The short answer
Heating work does not arrive evenly. It arrives in the first genuinely cold week, all at once, from people who were not thinking about you the week before.
Everything that decides whether they find you had to be in place before that week started.
The search happens at a bad hour on a small screen
A boiler fails in the evening. The search is typed on a phone, in a cold house, by somebody who is not going to read a second page of results.
What they get is a map with a few firms on it. Being one of those few is a different job from having a good website, and it is decided weeks earlier.
Why the cold snap is too late to start
A listing that is claimed and filled in during the busy week is competing against listings that have been collecting reviews since summer. Search does not reward the firm that showed up when the demand did.
The quiet months are when this is cheap. They are also when nobody feels like doing it.
Being found and being reachable are 2 different failures
A firm can win the search and still lose the job by not picking up, which is the argument on ProAffy's page and in a post of its own.
They fail separately and they are fixed separately. Being reachable does nothing if you were never in the list of 3, and being in the list does nothing if the phone rings out.
What to do in the quiet season
Claim the listing, get the service areas and hours right, and ask the customers you helped last winter for a review while they still remember. None of that costs money and all of it takes time to count.
Tell us what your quietest month is, and we will tell you what to have finished before the cold arrives. Get a free audit.
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