Company Name: Altitude Comfort Heating and Air

Owners: Doug Mills and Chris Mills

Website Address: www.altitudecomfort.com

Annual Cost: Approximately $80,000 per year

Doug Mills’ take: We want customers to be able to quickly find the information they’re looking for and offer numerous ways for them to connect with us. That’s why we have live chat on the site, and we don’t farm the customer service end out, we actually have our own people answering the live chat and talking to customers. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible, and we consider that part of our customer service.

Professional Opinion: Overall score: 84

AltitudeComfort.com uses a responsive design framework so that it loads correctly and looks great regardless of the device used to access it. It has lots of great content with the key information exactly where you’d expect to find it. Customer reviews and third-party symbols give the site a high degree of trust. Altitude Comfort could benefit significantly from additional SEO and online public relations as well as some technical enhancements to improve the load time of the site.

For findability, Altitude Comfort earns a 75. Altitudecomfort.com is a reminder that how a site looks and how well it ranks organically are not related. Using HVACSEOReports.com, I reviewed Altitudecomfort.com’s organic rankings on Google for a set of nearly 1,400 geographically targeted, service-specific keywords. The site ranks on the first page of Google 91 times and appeared in the No. 1 spot just 10 times. Although I think Altitudecomfort.com is a great-looking site, these scores are slightly below average.

I would give Altitude Comfort an 87 for accessibility and content. Aesthetics are subjective, but I think Altitudecomfort.com looks fantastic. It’s also easily accessible, regardless of whether you’re using a tablet, smartphone, or desktop computer. Most pages have a lot of content, which, while busy, is broken up fairly nicely using a variety of graphical elements and different fonts sizes. Altitudecomfort.com could gain additional points in this category by addressing some of its speed issues. Google’s speed test shows the site loads slowly for mobile as well as desktop visitors.

Altitudecomfort.com receives an identity and trust score of 91. The site earns points for displaying countless third-party trust builders on the home page, for providing easy access to customer reviews through Google, and by offering visitors a variety of ways to get in touch — phone, Web form, or live chat. Most of the critical information is where you’d expect to find it, as well. Altitude Comfort could earn additional points by including a picture of its trucks in the homepage banner, MasterCard and Visa logos by its phone number, and pictures of key employees on the About Us page.

— Ben Landers, president and CEO, Blue Corona

Publication date: 2/23/2015