Gutter Helmet: A new start?

For those who have been following our experiences with Gutter Helmet over the last five years (collected articles here), it’s time for an update.

About three weeks ago, we were contacted by the regional Gutter Helmet franchisee for New England, trying to find out what they could do to make us happy.

Why would they do this?

Well, if you do a Google search for “gutter hemet”, one of my blog posts detailing our negative experience back in 2005 is the third unpaid item on the list. It seems that they have gotten wise to the effect my simple blog posts were having on their reputation and brand.

Just for reference, I went back and looked in my logs for as long as I have them. I get on average 500 distinct page views a month for my Gutter Helmet posts and this number goes up substantially during peak gutter installation season.
“Gutter Helmet” is the number one search term coming into my site. And what people see when they get to my site is likely not the message the Gutter Helmet folks want to get across.

[Editor’s Note: As someone who writes mainly about Web performance and social media, this traffic trend is disturbing. But it also shows that you never know what will resonate with your audience until you write it!]

This past Friday, Gutter Helmet sent someone out to repair the situation. He found incorrectly installed (or missing) flashing and improperly installed helmet on both sides of the house. In the end, the entire helmet installation was replaced, and new flashing was installed.

Until we get Fall rains and the Winter snow returns, we won’t really know how successful this new install was, so stayed glued to your browsers for further updates.