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LOCKSMITH SEO GUIDE
Foreword
Setting out as a locksmith only digital marketing agency we had a few reasons this was an attractive endeavor.
Being that locksmith marketing, in general, is one of the most difficult verticals we’d worked in under our former agency Clickflame, we realized that locksmiths more than most companies suffer while trying to find a good agency.
When it comes to locksmith leads, we know that most of them come from Google Search. More specifically, though, most of them come to either high organic ranking locksmith businesses on Google Search either in the map pack, organic search, and some to the paid results.
With the introduction of flat-fee pricing for Google Local Service Ads, we found many locksmith companies leaned into these heavily in the last couple of years. However, with the introduction of a live auction bidding system for these leads, we’ve seen a decline in relying on these while a renewed focus for search engine optimization and paid ads has commenced.
Many locksmiths believe that just doing a good job with their website and listings is enough. Chances are, if you are a sole owner and operator, you will not need such a large boost as this guide can offer for your business. You may want to consider doing things a bit more slowly and overtime to not overload your business with more calls than you can handle.
For more established and scaled locksmith companies, though, there is quite simply always more that you can do to edge out a bit ahead of 2nd place month after month. You will want to because once you are ranking organically first for the keywords you want, it’s only a matter of time before your nearest competitors try to get ahead of you.
Anthony Hall is my name. I’ve been in the field of digital marketing for a total of 22 years, since the year after Google launched its search engine. I hope you find this guide helpful and as rewarding as the many locksmiths to use before you did. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have specific questions or need help with some or all of your campaigns.
Want to add to our locksmith SEO guide? Let us know by sending us an email.
Getting Started
You may follow the shortlist of steps or the more detailed walkthroughs below in our Locksmith SEO guide.
- Creating Your Business Name
- Getting A Good Domain
- Designing Your Logo
- Setting up your Google My Business Page
- Optimizing your Google My Business Page
- Directory Citation Building
- Social Link Building
- Website Speed & Performance
- On-Site SEO
- Blog Posting
- Backlinks
- Review Generation
- Social Credibility
- Certifications & Badges
Creating Your Business Name
Creating the right business name for your company can be a challenge. Take a look at how we did it. We’re great at Locksmith SEO, which is why we picked the name “Best Locksmith SEO”. This works well because within a month of launching our website we were on the first page of Google search internationally for the exact match phrase.
Locksmiths should consider picking names like their city name and service, just like the below guide on getting a good domain.
Getting A Good Domain
Selecting a good domain can be easy if you choose a very unique business name. However, a great domain for the purpose of this locksmith SEO guide is one that will help you rank better and get more business.
Picking a domain with the city and service you offer is a great way to do this.
Some examples include:
- bestlocksmithmiami.com
- losangeleslocksmith.com
- californialocksmiths.com
Even if your business name is a little different than your domain name, this is okay.
Setting Up Google My Business
If you haven’t done so already, your number one priority is to go to business.google.com and set up your locksmith Google My Business Page. While many companies find this easy to do, most locksmiths wind up with a suspended page either initially or sometime down the road. Successfully setting up your Google My Business page means that you will quickly be able to collect leads from people looking for a local locksmith, and in a short time, these should account for over 80% of your inbound traffic.
Acceptable documentations to avoid or fix a suspension you can be prepared with include:
- Business Insurance
- Business License
- Photos of the front of a storefront if you have one
- Photos of any permanent signage
Many locksmiths ask about setting up more than one page in a marketplace. This can be done but not very easy and is not a part of this guide. To dive into it, though, shortly, you don’t want to have any matching addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, or websites between the multiple pages. Otherwise, Google will quickly detect that you are trying to game the system, and you could end up with a suspended page.
Also, you can have another page with the same information, but it has to be at least 15 miles away from your first initial location.
logo design
Memorable, sharp, and something you can proudly stand behind. Does this sound like your business logo? Your logo should accomplish a few simple things on behalf of your business. While many companies go down a rabbit hole on logo design, the locksmith logo design should not be too complicated.
- Define your brand identity
- Color Palette options evaluated
- Picking the right typography
- Color psychology considered
- Don’t feel the need to be too cliche with your logo, just because you’re a locksmith doesn’t mean you need a key or a lock in your logo.
Overall, we’ve had a lot of success with a minimalist approach to locksmith logos with just the business name typed out in a good font. Don’t be afraid to choose a simple logo to start with as often logo design services can get quite pricey as you try to hone in on that perfect logo design.
Okay we were a little cliche with our logo, but what can we say but that we loved it!
Setting Up Your Google My Business Page
Google Local Map Pack Accounts For Over 80% OF New Business!
Start setting up your new Google My Business page at business.google.com.
Sign up for a profile under a Gmail email address. Once you have set up your new local page, you will send yourself a postcard to your business address. This is one of the most important first steps you will take for your business. Don’t get eager, though, and start mailing them out to every address you can get mail at.
Duplicate pages can be hard to master. That’s when you set up more than one GMB for your locksmith business in the same city. This locksmith SEO guide is meant for a single location.
This step can be the most frustrating of all for locksmiths. When your postcard arrives, if your page does get immediately suspended, this is completely normal. Once you receive your postcard, please enter the verification code into your business to claim it as your own.
When sending yourself a postcard for pin verification, it’s important to show your address to the public only if your business has an actual store at its location. Many locksmiths are mobile service only. This is fine, too, but it needs to be set up differently.
Mobile locksmith Google My Business pages require that you do not show your business address to the public and show what zip codes you serve as a business that goes out to a customer. Mixing these up means more downtime as you have to verify your business in different ways before it will be out of suspension.
Getting out of suspension requires that you fill out the form located here.
Initially you will be asked a series of questions resulting in a form for your to fill out. Here is an example of the initial questions.
Next, you’ll have to fill out the below form and click submit. After that, you’ll wait for a Google representative to reach out to discuss what it is they need to verify before your locksmith page being live on Google Maps. Be aware that although this is the correct process, you may have to go through these steps more than once before you get your page active.
When your page is live, you’ll want to make sure you fill out all of the sections below. When you put as much relevant information as possible in setting up your Google My Business Page for a locksmith, you will get more business for the lifetime of your business.
Optimizing Your Google My Business Page
This is one of the most crucial steps within our locksmith SEO guide. Please make certain to accurately fill out your business name as you would like it to appear anywhere it is found online. This is important because your business will rank better for popular and valuable keywords based on the accuracy of your business everywhere it appears online.
Another option that may be a little more tricky is adding keywords within your business name field. Doing so will raise both your risk of suspension as well as your ranking and overall traffic. Safer is the better option, in our opinion. Still, occasionally we will start putting keywords the client wants to rank for in the business name field, especially if they have multiple pages already.
The one we’re doing this to is not the primary page.
This would look as such:
You are allowed to write up to a 750 characters business description for your Google My Business Page. While we don’t always use all 750 characters, we use most of them. It’s important to utilize keywords that you want your business to rank for, as well as locations you’d like to show up in primarily.
As covered in the section to the left, you will want to show your business address to the public only if it is an actual store that customers can visit in person.
Mobile locksmiths that only go out to their customers need to select a service radius to show where they are willing to travel to.
Temporary offices or post office boxes are some unique attempts we’ve seen for locksmiths looking for new pages and thus more business. These do not often work, and there are better ways of going about saturating a marketplace that we could help you with.
Here is an example of business address for a locksmith without a physical location:
Local phone numbers are best as they represent what people are familiar with. Most people are less trusting of a business with an out-of-area phone number or toll-free option on their local page.
Your hours of operation should be as accurate as possible. Even if you don’t get much work in the late hours, posting your hours, 24/7 will net you more business as you grow since more established locksmiths may be closed late at night. That being said, you also don’t want bad reviews for saying your open but not answering when a potential customer has an emergency outside of more traditional business hours.
While the category of locksmith is the most basic and optimal category, there are several others like safe locksmith or emergency locksmith you’ll want to select as well. Make sure you select as many as are relevant that you can.
Without a physical location, you’ll want to select the categories “locksmith” and “emergency locksmith service” if you offer emergency services. With a physical location, you can also include categories such as “locks supplier” and “lock store.”
You’ll want to post optimized photos of your business, logos and of locksmiths out in the field performing tasks. This means clear and crisp photos with additional information placed in the meta description of the photo.
It’s also important to mention that you can only modify the properties of a photo like this on a windows based computer.
Even short videos of you doing locksmith services out at your client’s home or business can help immensely. Remember, you’re trying to look as active and engaged as possible.
Place all of the different services you provide in your service menu. Some examples of popular locksmith services include:
- Commercial Locksmith
- Residential Locksmith
- Rekey
- Duplicate Key Service
- Safe Locksmith
- Auto Keys
- Auto Keys with Transponders
By being as descriptive as possible, you constantly show search engines how much more relevant your company is over other competitors in your area. If you have made it through this much of our locksmith SEO guide, you will likely want to do as much optimization as possible. Don’t rush. Great SEO takes time.
You can pre-populate your own questions and answers section so that potential clients can have a resource for the questions you get the most often.
You will want to post a welcome offer when you first open your business online. Something like 10% off for mentioning you found us on Google is an easy choice.
Continue on to post as often as you can. Interesting news and humor are some options to consider as well as promotions or discounts.
Direct messaging can be a great option to offer customers a quick way to get in touch. Enable the functionality from your locksmith Google My Business Page, and you’re good to go.
Once your page has been active for a little while, you’ll be able to view insights about how your locksmith company is performing in Google search. Phone calls, visits to your website, and the actual keywords people found you for will be listed here. This is especially useful as you try to add more digital marketing because this graph will show the impact or lack thereof of different efforts you try over the years.
Keeping track of your monthly performance reports will allow you to double down on what’s working best for you.
We consistently use this data as a core component on locksmith local search engine optimization services. This, in combination with call tracking and Google Analytics, compromise the foundation of being able to track a good digital marketing campaign.
Directory Citations
Tier 1 Directory Citations Automated
While there are many ways and services you can use to do this, we offer a service for just $45 a month. Other services and options that will do the same thing include Yext and SEMRush as a service provider. This will give you directory citations like Yahoo and Mapquest that have been around so long. They are a powerful anchor for your digital campaign.
This locksmith SEO guide will not touch on how to operate these mechanisms, as they are fairly self-explanatory once you sign up with an option for this style of service.
Manual Citations
Manual citations are ones that you would build on each website. One great advantage to seeking out and building manual citations is that most of your competitors will not have done this step when setting up their marketing accounts online. While very time-consuming, this area is highly worth investing in to move past persistent competitors uniquely.
Social Links
It’s important to set up all possible social media websites. Not because you’ll get a terrible amount of business directly from them, but because we want Google to index these web properties as belonging to your business and rank you online accordingly.
- Youtube
- Myspace (We do hear some funny responses to this one, but it’s still one of the oldest websites on the internet, hence a powerful link for your business.)
Website Performance
Whether you’re just trying to rank your business in the Google Local Map Pack or get your website to rank in organic search results, website speed, performance, and user experience matter a lot in any endeavor for your business online. While many other locksmith SEO guides do not cover this area, our locksmith SEO guide does because we know how important a ranking factor this area is nowadays.
Testing Speed & Performance
We like to test on more than one platform to get as much information as possible about a website’s speed and performance. Where a website can lose as much as 57% of its traffic from just failing to load in 3 seconds, Google takes statistics like this about your website and uses them to see how engaged your users are. More engaged users mean a rise in traffic and search rankings.
Repair as much as possible from the below tools, and you’d see an immediate 30 to 50% increase in organic traffic alone within 30 days. Separate from going through this locksmith SEO guide, come back to this step in the future to keep checking if your website needs a tune-up.
Don’t be alarmed if you start with a low score, most websites we meet (99%), can be improved drastically.
On Site SEO Plugin or Setup
We utilize both depending on project and client needs. Both are very robust SEO plugins that will create a sitemap for your website and allow you to add metadata on each page of your website. They will also score each page and give feedback on how to raise the on-site SEO score per page.
In addition to this locksmith SEO guide, check out our recent article on locksmith website design for more tips in this area.
Blog Posts
How to write an effective blog post
First you will want to come up with a few titles such as:
“Best Locksmith In Las Vegas”
“7 Locksmith Specials in Your City”
“How to Be Proactive In Securing Your Home”
Follow this up with an outline similar to an essay style. You’ll want to build an article with a minimum of 500 words and maximum of 750 for a basic blog article. Breaking down your paragraphs into just 3 to 4 sentences will make bite sized pieces of content that people will be able to digest easier.
There are two kinds of links it’s important to include in your article when possible. Interior linking is where you link to a relevant article or page on your website. Off-site links need to be both relevant and not a competitor. Typically you’d look for a nationwide company or a non-locksmith company that wrote on a similar topic. Links need to add value to your customers’ read of your content. Google will also be scanning your links, both coming and going to rate them on how relevant they are.
To dive deeper than this Locksmith SEO guide does on writing blog posts to promote your business, check out this new article on the subject by The Guardian.
Backlinks
Guest Posts
Guest posts are articles that are either written by you or at your request. They are then placed on websites that are not your own with a link that points back at either your home page or a page on your site. These can be the hardest to get as you will either be paying for a site to list your post or asking people to upload your content on their website because it will add value to their readership. Either way you will be investing in either lengthy content or paying websites that link to you a one time fee.
Another strategy that works great here is to prepare two articles that are slightly different so as not to be plagiarized. One would be placed on your website as a blog post, the other on a third party website as a link back to you. This greatly helps your linking strategy and rankings because the content both off and on site is so relevant to each other.
Keyword density should be no more than 2 to 5 repeats of the same keyword phrases. You will also want to build a semantic cloud of synonymous keywords and related content. Google plays close attention to all of the content on your website and builds a cloud of relevant terms to know what to show to users searching online.
Remember that finding websites that will allow a guest post and not require payment is somewhat of the mythical unicorn of backlinks for your website. They are far and few between. Oftentimes these can take months or even years to find, depending on your industry.
While we can give you the Locksmith SEO guide, some steps like this one are trial and error to find the right places online to advertise like this.
Comments
This is one of the lowest quality backlinks that your business can get and free. By searching relevant keywords to your business, you will come across other companies’ content in the form of blogs. These blogs will have an option to leave a comment. When you leave a comment on a blog post, you can choose to include a link to your website. Doing so to a specific piece of content that is actually relevant to your comment is always best and will make them less likely to be deleted. Adding value is always the best way to be appreciated in your linking strategy online instead of just coming off like a spammy jerk.
When crafting a comment to link to your website, have value in your comment is the first step. Quickly followed by where the link is going on your website. If it’s going to a blog article on the same subject matter, then you’re very likely to have your comment stick. However, if your link is sent from a specific blog post to your home page, this is not likely to stick unless a person doesn’t moderate the comment.
Local Backlinks
Websites exist that are not specific to locksmiths but are very specific to cities. For example, Las Vegas has a city-specific website called vegaschamber.com. Here a collection of Las Vegas businesses exist. Some locksmiths like to avoid paid listings to keep costs down, but there are plenty of free options depending on your city. Any directory of local businesses in areas you would do work are fair game. They will also show your geographical area as a reference point search engines like Google can use to see you are the most authentic in marketing specific areas. This section is probably one of the most valuable sections of our Locksmith SEO guide!
Review Generation
Where to get reviews
You will want to get reviews on Google Maps, Locksmithlistings.com, Yelp.com, Facebook.com, and Trustpilot.com. Each website shows up in your city when people look up locksmith reviews. By placing yourself high in the rankings on these websites, your business will only be more visible. One thing we can’t stress enough about is getting reviews. This Locksmith SEO Guide will only take you so far before a competitor getting great reviews will start to beat you.
How to get reviews
Ask for them. Often and as much as possible. There is no substitute here for pure persistence.
Why are reviews so important to your locksmith business?
Getting reviews will raise your rankings on Google, Yelp and any other website you get them on. Not only that, but when customers see your business next to a competitor and you have a higher rating than them, it’s pretty simple that you’ll get more calls than your competitors do.
Establishing Social Credibility
Social credibility is the practice of showing why your business is a popular option with other people and therefore can be trusted to purchase from. Locksmiths have a few powerful areas that can impact their social credibility as it leads to a sale.
Reviews
Now, we just covered some information on getting reviews, but these reviews also play a powerful role in your conversion of people that see your business into actual customers.
Notice how it’s not the amount of reviews, but the overall quality of your reviews that matters most. Now in a search like this it’s possible because of price or wait times that a customer could hire someone other than Silverstate Locksmith, but not very likely unless they cost drastically more or had a longer wait time right?
Certifications
One popular badge in the locksmith community is the ALOA security professionals association badge. ALOA has been around for a long time and is one of the most respected names in certifications for security professionals.
Another great thing to show on your website is your locksmith license or certification number from your local city, county, or state, depending on your location’s regulations. While many locksmiths have such a number that designates the legality of the services they provide, not very many show this as a priority on their websites.
Getting as many certifications as possible is always a good step in this Locksmith SEO guide.
Badges
Depending on what certifications and experience your locksmith company already has you may find it a quick process to work through other online certifications or background checks to earn other forms of social credentials in the form of badges or awards.
Locksmithlisting.com offers a series of badges designed to look sharp online and also be awarded only to licensed, bonded and trustworthy locksmiths in the United States. Several other similar organizations exist overseas but for the moment we’re just focused on the United States.
Closing Thoughts
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Locksmith SEO guide. While we will be adding to it, any company that follows this step by step Locksmith SEO guide will see a sharp increase in phone calls and leads.
Take a chance to document your journey through our Locksmith SEO guide and we would love to feature an article about your locksmith business.