Company Name: Bay Area Heating & Cooling Inc.

Marketing Director: Jim Taylor

Website Address: www.bayareaheatingandcooling.com

Annual Cost: $500

Owner’s Goals: We want to convey quality and reliability. It’s important that customers see us as a professional, expert company they can trust. The thing I like most about our site is it reinforces the brand and is comprehensive.

Professional Opinion: For findability, I’d give Bay Area Heating & Cooling a 96. It ranks on the first page of Google more than 25 percent of the time for a list of 500-plus geographically and service-related keywords surveyed. The site ranks No. 1 organically on Google 6.25 percent of the time, which is more than two times higher than most of the sites previously featured in this column.

For accessibility and content, I’d give the website an 86. The site loads quickly (one of the fastest tested so far) and consistently across all devices. The site has more than 200 pages of relevant content and an average of 1,000 words per page. While the fonts used are fairly small, considering the current trend in website design, the important information is located where consumers expect it to be and is easy to find quickly, as a result.
In the identity and trust category, Bay Area Heating & Cooling gets an 85. The company features a satisfaction-guaranteed image, a full testimonials page, and third-party validators like the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Angie’s List, North American Technician Excellence (NATE), ACCA, and others. The company should consider adding additional trust builders such as the Visa and Master Card logos below its phone number. The site should also consider updating its Angie’s List badge, which is from 2011.

— Ben Landers, president and CEO, Blue Corona

Publication date: 9/29/2014

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