Online with Orth: Learning the Basics
Internet expert Scott Orth offered attendees of both the Independent Glass Association and National Windshield Repair Association annual conferences a look at the online world and items they should watch when setting up or re-designing their websites.
“Does design matter?” asked Orth. “It’s more about layout and ease of use.”
And clarity is key. “The real goal is to show customers what you do when they get to the site.”
He also suggested that auto glass business owners watch their rankings in various search engines in an effort to compete with industry giants in this area. For example, he advised attendees to search for both “auto glass” and “auto glass repair” in various search engines to see where their businesses fall, and then to work on moving to a higher ranking through re-designs, re-wording and more.
Orth advised part of this is scanning your site for any broken links or errors in the HTML code.
“Any of those things tells a search engine, ‘Stop coming to my page,’” he said.
Theme pages also need to be created.
“Every single page on your site has the ability to show up in a search engine and you should be theming each page so it shows up,” he said.
Though meta-descriptions don’t necessarily help a page to be found, once a page is found by a search engine the meta-description tells the Internet user whether it’s what he/she was looking for.
“The meta-description doesn’t help you show up in search engines, but it does help you market your page when it does show up,” Orth added.
As for “search engine optimization,” also known as SEO, Orth suggested having others link to your site and vice versa.
“[This] also helps build trust with your customer base,” he said, “and it also helps drive traffic.”
Orth also addressed pay-per-click marketing, and said that when deciding whether to use this, you should look at the following:
- Is your company local, national or global?
- What’s your marketing budget? and
- Are you using other marketing channels?
“There’s no stand-alone campaign,” he said. “All of these work together.”
He also suggested that if you do use paper-click, bolding particular phrases, such as “auto glass,” can be important.
“Anytime you’ve got that bolding, your ad’s going to stand out a little more,” he said.
Lastly, Orth pointed out that it’s important to continually review whatever method you do choose by looking at page visit stats, views, bounce rates (when someone comes to your site and backs out quickly), and referral data.