Oven season is three weeks out. What an appliance repair shop should run now.
Thanksgiving is the busiest oven and range week of the year. The ads, Google post, past-customer text and schedule changes to make before the first igniter call.
The first big meal of the season is the day every slow igniter in the country finally quits. In most markets the oven and range calls start climbing the second week of November and peak the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Then dishwashers, the week after, once they have run four loads a day for five days.
If your shop waits until the calls start to adjust anything, you will be competing for the same homeowner as every other shop that also waited. Here is what to change this week, three weeks out, while the board is still quiet from the fall dip.
Change the ads before the demand arrives
Google Ads first. If you run an ad group per appliance, raise the oven and range group's bids 20% to 30% starting around November 5 and leave them there through the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Clicks on "oven not heating" and "gas range repair" run $7 to $15 most of the year; in the holiday window they climb and the competition for them climbs too. Being there when the search happens is worth a few dollars more per click because the homeowner is not shopping around. They need it fixed by Thursday.
Rewrite the oven ad to say so. "Oven not heating? Same-week appointments before Thanksgiving. $89 diagnostic, applied to repair." The ad that names the holiday wins the click over the ad that says "fast, reliable appliance repair".
Add a sitelink to the oven page and a callout with the labor warranty. Check that the oven page on the site actually lists the common faults with a price range: igniter $150 to $250, bake element $140 to $220, control board $250 to $450. If it does not, the website guide has the structure, and this is the week to fix it.
Meta second. The fall dryer vent offer that ran in October should switch over around November 8 to a short phone video of a tech testing an igniter, with the line "the first big meal is when it fails; we check ovens this week for $89". Keep the budget modest, $15 to $20 a day. Meta is not where the emergency call comes from, but it is where the homeowner who noticed the oven taking longer to preheat last Sunday decides to deal with it.
Text the past customers
Every customer from the last two years with a phone number gets one text, around November 4:
"Hi, it is the shop that fixed your dryer this spring. Quick note: oven and range calls pile up the week of Thanksgiving. If yours has been slow to heat or the igniter clicks a long time, we have slots this week and next at the normal $89 diagnostic. Reply OVEN and we will find a time."
Past customers book at several times the rate of strangers and the text costs almost nothing. The ones who reply in the first week get fixed before the rush. The ones who do not will remember the text when the oven quits on the 25th, and they will call you instead of searching.
Post it on the Google profile
One Google post with the same message and a call button. 48.2% of appliance repair companies have no hours on their profile at all, let alone a post about the holiday. A post that says "oven appointments available this week, before Thanksgiving" sits on your listing for seven days and does nothing but help.
While you are in the profile, add Saturday hours if you run them in November. Only 35.3% of shops show Saturday hours, and the Saturday before Thanksgiving is one of the busiest oven days of the year.
Change the schedule, not just the marketing
Marketing is wasted if the board cannot take the calls. Three changes for the two weeks around the holiday:
- Hold two oven slots a day open until noon. Release them to general calls if unfilled. A homeowner who hears "we can be there tomorrow" books on the spot.
- Stock igniters for the top four brands in every van. A one-trip igniter job is $200 and 40 minutes. A two-trip igniter job is the same $200, two drives, and a customer who found someone else by the time the part came in.
- Run the text-back and the answering coverage through 7 p.m. that week. The oven calls come in the evening, when the homeowner tried to preheat for dinner and nothing happened. The missed calls guide covers the setup; the week before Thanksgiving is the worst possible time for a voicemail greeting.
And the week after
Dishwashers and garbage disposals, from the Friday after Thanksgiving through the first week of December. Shift the Google bids from the oven group to the dishwasher group on the Wednesday before the holiday, and swap the Meta video to a dishwasher not draining. Then the January dip arrives, and the slow season plan takes over.
None of this is complicated. It is a calendar, a few bid changes, one text and two schedule rules. The shops that do it every year are the ones whose November looks like a good month instead of a chaotic one. If you would rather have it set up and run, the seasonal Google and Meta adjustments are part of the free 14-day trial, and this is a good two weeks to try it.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, appliance repair companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor