Locksmith Online Marketing – Overview

The internet offers tremendous marketing opportunities for local business owners and one industry that has caught on to this trend quickly is the locksmith industry. As traditional marketing cost rise and the effectiveness drops small local business owners are forced to market their business in a much smarter way.

Although the internet is a global domain, there are more searches preformed looking for local information like, local businesses, directions, local news, events, organisations, etc every day. Even Google the world’s largest search engine has recognised this trend and has developed many tools, many which are free to help small local business owners use the internet to grow their business.

Locksmith Online Marketing – The Basics

When it comes to marketing your locksmith business online there are a variety of methods you can approach, at the end of the day to get the most from your online marketing it is best to employ all the methods suggested in this article, however you can get great results just by applying one or some of them.

If you don’t have a website you can still use the internet to get customers. One of the free tools Google has developed is a service called Google Places. This is simply a free business listing in Google, why would you want to list your business with Google? Simply because when a potential customer types in ‘locksmith in (your town)’ your business can show up on the first page with a pin on a map showing your customers exactly where you are and how to find you.

Locksmith Online Marketing – Your Website

If you do have a website then you want to first make sure it is optimized for the search engines. SEO or search engine optimization is a huge part when it comes to marketing your locksmith business online.

In order to optimize your website it must involve several processes like:

• Correct keyword research and selection – what are the keyword your customers are typing in to the search engines when trying to find your product or service.
• Make sure you include these keywords in your text, tags, and descriptions
• Back linking and link exchange – this is where other sites link back to your site, backlinks are like ‘votes’ in the eyes on the search engines. The more ‘votes’ or links you have the better it usually is.
• Register your website with the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing

By doing this things it will help your website show up naturally in the search engines, the higher up the page you website shows up the more visitors you will get and the more customers you will get. Once you have established your high rankings these visitors/customers are completely free.

Locksmith Online Marketing – Advertising

There are many ways to have your website shown in front of your target market when they are surfing the internet. One of the best and most powerful ways of paid advertising is Google’s AdWords platform; it is also referred to as PPC or Pay-Per-Click.

PPC allows you to only pay when someone clicks on your ad, in other words you only pay when your ad actually works! This can be very profitable way to market local small businesses on the internet as you can pay as little as a few cents to a few dollars in most cases per click.

You can also target only the people that are most likely to buy from you, you can have your ad show only in certain areas, cities, countries, etc, at certain times during the day, to a certain demographic.

Locksmith Online Marketing – Summary

If you haven’t started marketing your locksmith business on the internet, then now is the time to start. It is very possible to grow a large clientele base using only the internet, as time goes on you realise that the quality of your keywords and backlinks make a big difference.

The internet truly offers unmatched marketing potential over traditional marketing methods; however like everything it takes action to get results.