Digital marketing in Sydney for a locksmith
In 2019 i was contracted by a local Sydney locksmith to provide digital marketing consultation. They needed help making updates to their website that was built by someone on Fiverr plus needed to improve their SEO performance to generate more leads. I used my mix of marketing skills to provide consulting for brand development, website design, content & SEO development.
The digital marketing I executed delivered a huge increase in website visitors in a short space of time – they had just 69 visitors in the previous 6 months, I got them over 2,200 page views in a few weeks and recognised for more than 250 different search terms.
Why did the locksmith need digital marketing assistance
Tom and Tony had merged their independent locksmith businesses to form a new company called Scope Security. Their aim was to broaden their offering beyond locksmith services to compete in the security market segment. Their initial request was to get help with Google Ads placement, although after a marketing review of their current executions I recommended a more thorough approach had to be taken before they spent money on paid ads.
With a limited budget, the digital marketing brief was to work with the website that was already in place to deliver improvements where possible, clean up their online profiles including getting access to their old Google My Business listing which was inactive.
What digital marketing was needed to improve their performance?
This locksmith business had a website that was essentially an ‘online business card’ – it wasn’t generating any visitors, less than one hundred people had seen it in the previous 6 months. Why?
- It had been built very cheaply using a freelancer on Fiverr. It it looked and felt ‘cheap’ and in comparison to local competitors it didn’t feel trustworthy or reliable. This isn’t the freelancers fault necessarily, it is the risk that business owners take by not engaging an experienced website designer and investing correctly to build a brand profile.
- The business owners couldn’t make their own changes to the site because of the way it had been built. All of the pages were custom coded which made it easy for a developer, but near impossible for the business owners.
- Major on page technical SEO elements were missing across the site, things like page headings, titles & descriptions. So the site wasn’t getting indexed by Google or able to compete with relevant keywords.
- Each page of the site was created literally from what the owners had provided the freelancer. There was no interpretation or assessment of those requests that related to consumer search behaviour for their service or industry. Essentially it was a heap of waffle that didn’t mean a lot & was just promising the same things as everyone else. There was no unique selling proposition or differentiation at all.
- The site wasn’t set up to be tracked or have data performance reporting so the owners would never really even know if there was traffic going to the site.
The trap that these business owners fell into is very familiar. They couldn’t justify investing in getting their website built when they knew there was free builders available or freelancers who could do it for a few hundred dollars.
Guess what?
The digital marketing industry preys on this level of ignorance. They don’t make the business owner aware that it will be a waste of time building a site that nobody will see or find. Then they force their hand into spending money on digital advertising or paying for SEO later. All the while it could have been done properly to begin with.
Business owners are also to blame because they did not do their due diligence & chose to pay as little as possible to have a website with the thought it would be found by thousands of people and help promote their business. It is important to understand that placing a site on the internet will not guarantee traffic and new customers.
I identified over 1,000 competing locksmith services in Sydney and their current website wasn’t even appearing in the top 100 search results for any online search query related to their business. Even if they did manage to have someone visit their website, there wasn’t enough information to convert them to a potential lead because it was so poorly presented.
The website freelancer on Fiverr had technically fulfilled their contract which was ‘Create a website for us’ but no other work was done to make it relevant, credible or to have the set up needed to create search traffic results. I presented all of the findings to the owners with a list of suggestions that would fix this for them in order to grow customer acquisition and retention.
My contracted period was March, April & May in 2019 to redevelop their digital marketing execution, these are the key areas I worked on;
- Industry keyword research and consumer insight analysis.
- Website development
- Transition to WordPress CMS to aid local management.
- Review of previous company websites that were still live.
- Removal of toxic backlinks set up to create 'fake' traffic.
- Brand story and unique selling proposition development.
- Facebook and LInkedIn social media profile updates.
- Restoration of their Google My Business listing.
- Google My Business optimisation.
- Service Seeking quote template set ups.
- Google Analytics, Search Console & Bing directory listing set ups.
- Set up of shared calendar across IOS, Android & Windows for job tracking.
- Set up of review links and methodology for collecting new reviews.
- Basic staff and service photography.
How many more customers did I generate for the locksmith?
From 69 visitors in 6 months to 110 in 2 weeks
Paul's extensive knowledge about business marketing, advertising, social media platforms and website development is outstanding. His determination to see us reach our goals is most appreciated.
Thanks for being a part of our team and we will be sure to call on you again."
I delivered immediate results that were tracked and reported using Google Analytics, Google Search Console & Google My Business data. Most significantly I managed to resolve a 6 month dispute related to their Google My Business listing to re-enable their profile and regain their online visibility.
Huge improvements were made not only to the volume of visitors coming to the website, but the number of relevant search terms they began ranking for. To help reduce long term costs, my website development including a transition from raw bootstrap coding to using a WordPress CMS with a page building tool to enable the owners to make their own updates without having to pay a developer each time.
The new foundation was put in place & the early results had all the data showing the right changes had been made to grow their website traffic & generate more leads. See some of the highlights below;
- New website search engine optimised content and pages.
- 48,000 Google Search listing impressions vs 1,000 prev 6 months.
- An average Google listing position of 43 within 2 weeks.
- 110 site visits in a few weeks vs just 69 prev 6 months and 2+ minutes per session.
- Over 2,200 page views with newly created pages over 30% of volume.
- Google My Business listing approval, over 1,100 impressions .
- New FAQ and Special Offer pages on 1st page of Google searches.
- Major improvement in relevant search queries for locksmith related terms.
- Bounce rate reduced from over 40% to below 2%
- New brand and service photography used on all digital platforms.
- Revised Service Seeking quote templates to better promote the brand.
- Refreshed Facebook and LinkedIn profile set ups.
- Creation of photo repository for all jobs completed.
- Job booking calendar set up synchronised across devices.
What else did the locksmith need to do to grow their website visitor traffic?
Yes its easy to highlight all the quick wins when it comes to digital marketing. The locksmith chose not to continue spending money on digital marketing activities as they were happy with the initial results. Although it is important to keep in perspective that it will limit their potential exposure in such a competitive market.
They would have to rely on building a broad customer base that would rely on referral & returning customers rather than getting a regular flow of new ones. Simply because there are more than 1,000 other locksmiths in Sydney. I did recommend these actions to be taken
- Use short bursts of Google Ads targeted to the local area for specific job types.
- Capture and share before and after photos from each job & add them to the website to show different examples of work & create unique content for the site..
- Reach out to all previous customers requesting reviews to be written on their Google My Business profile to help with local search results..
- Present all offers as Inc-GST pricing to make it easier for consumers to compare & understand.
- Create a guarantee for all work done to help provide peace of mind.
- Share content across all platforms especially Google My Business.
- Establish a lead conversion & tracking system to measure the volume of leads needed to generate certain levels of revenue or profitability each month.
- Review their customer database to identify regular vs new clients to better understand where most of their revenue was being generated.
- Rebuild the website to completely remove all the legacy coding that was put in place by the freelance work.
Fast forward to 2022 what do the results look like?
Unfortunately this locksmith business didn’t really adopt any of my suggestions from 2019. There was good organic traffic growth going into 2020 but there have been more than forty Google algorithm updates and changes since then. Plus their site has remained static for nearly three years with no new information or content added.
Meanwhile new competitors would have opened, others would have made changes to their websites & the world generally would have evolved. I don’t have any insights into their business volumes but I’d have to assume they are happy with where they are performing.
One of the interesting results is they rank on the first page of Google for ‘Locksmith Sydney Cost’ which was one of my digital marketing strategies to create content for this long tail keyword. It isn’t the most popular search term in the category, but it is a very specific search phrase for someone trying to get pricing.
While 80% or more clicks go to the first few positions, the fact they are on the first page after three years shows that some of the earlier digital marketing work was done well. A small local locksmith is able to compete online against huge corporate websites like HiPages by being clever about the SEO development and execution.
