When most people break their windshield or another window of their car, they don’t usually have strong opinions about who is going to fix it. What they know is that waiting to fix the problem, the crack will tends to grow, making it necessary to replace the entire window or windshield (a more expensive proposition). So typically, repairs like this need to be done quickly and ideally, in a location that is convenient.

From the business perspective, attracting and converting the windshield repair customers is not simple. A windshield repair business uses transactional marketing that focuses on single transactions since the average customer isn’t going to have this happen often in their lifetime. With an emphasis on maximizing efficiency and volume of individual sales rather than developing a relationship with the buyer, windshield repair businesses have a higher customer acquisition cost. Like any business, however, it’s important that you provide great customer service, streamline operations, and improve marketing efforts over time.

Independent digital marketing review of 4 windshield repair businesses in Austin, Texas

Last week, I gathered with three OGO Sense web designers to review the digital marketing efforts of four different windshield repair businesses in Austin, Texas. We found room for improvement in the competitive marketplace. We’ve broken down our review results in 3 major sections:

1. Online visibility - ease of someone being able to locate you when they are looking for the windshield repair service.
2. Website quality - website quality that has a good chance of telling the best story to the visitor and convince him that you’re the best choice for what they need.
3. Off-site trust symbols - Before doing business with you, customers may often look you up on Yelp or Facebook to see reviews and check how long you might have been in business.

The maximum score is 100. The franchise unit of Safelite received the highest score of 77 while the local business JRD Windshield Repair received the lowest score of 53. Ratings are explained with examples below the table.

What can you learn from the above ratings in terms of online visibility?

1. Successful local businesses are easy to find online. For local businesses, Google local search rankings are more important than regular Google search rankings.
2. For many local businesses, ranking well on Yelp can lead to substantial number of leads.
3. Listings in specialized quality industry directories such as windshieldreferral.com can also improve your website search engine ranking.
4. Some brands may supplement their traffic with paid ads although this could be expensive or provide bad ROI if not handled correctly.

What can you learn from the above ratings in terms of website quality?

1. Successful brands have a personalized website that tells their story in the best possible way. Their branding is professional. Websites are easy to use and have quality information architecture.
2. Design quality have high impact on the initial perception and responsive websites adjust to the size of visitor screen no matter what device he or she uses.
3. Modern websites do not use flash and have high content quality with clear calls to action.
4. Unique selling points and trust symbols (example: certifications) can be used to persuade visitors to use one brand vs other brands.

What can you learn from the above ratings in terms of offsite trust symbols?

1. Successful brands also have strong off-site trust symbols - When users are not familiar with a particular brand or may not trust a claim their website is making, users will typically go off-site to find the business on Yelp, BBB, Facebook or other property to doublecheck years in service, user reviews, ratings and comments.
2. Successful brands have a variety of symbols, both self created and created by others.

Using this small industry in this specific geographic area, we can see overall online trends useful to many businesses. If you want us to do this exercise with your business/industry, contact us for a consultation.