A Philadelphia Locksmith

In the heavily competitive Philadelphia locksmith market, AMPM Locksmith stands out as a legitimate and trustworthy service for the community. Their primary service is emergency lockout for both home and vehicles. They also count many Philadelphia businesses as clients, helping them with security and lock change-outs when needed.

We were referred to them from another client in New York City in 2012 and have provided various web design and web marketing services for them ever since. Shay Ankori, the owner of AMPM, is a hard-working technician and a leading expert in home and automotive security within the Philadelphia area.

Increase ROI

There are few industries serving a local community that are more competitive than the locksmith business. Since most consumers who are locked out are desperate and call the first locksmith they find, our objective was to get top visibility for local, organic and paid search, giving AMPM many chances on the first page of search results to capture consumers’ attention and win their business.

Making Cut-Throat Competitors Irrelevant

The locksmith industry has one of the worst reputations of any B2C service provider. Many are unlicensed and intentionally damage property only to charge for the repairs. They take advantage of desperate consumers in time of need with excessive prices and over-charges.

Knowing that many stranded consumers will call the first locksmith they find on their mobile phones, they have become notorious for manipulating search engines and for trying to game the system in order to appear at the top of search. They make fake listings in multiple markets, they engage in fraudulent backlink campaigns and use paid tools to automate fake traffic to their websites.

When it comes to paid search, many engage in fraudulent click campaigns, using proxies and multiple IP addresses to click on competitor websites to raise the advertising spend of their competitors.

Google has done a lot to try to reign in many of the bad players, but much still needs to be done.

Driving Targeted Traffic that Converts

Even though few consumers who call a locksmith actually read the content on their websites, we still needed the site to rank well in search. Knowing Google likes websites with lots of unique, relevant and comprehensive content, we re-designed the website with this kind of content in mind while still giving it a modern, clean design.

For the few consumers who actually peruse the website, we knew establishing trust was the most important step we could take to earn their business. Therefore, we added trust signals such as the client’s 5-star rating in Yelp and his association with local organizations in the Philadelphia community. We also were intentionally forthright about the possibilities for locksmith scams and gave consumers tips on how to spot and avoid bad locksmiths.

We also wrote specific pages for various long-tailed keywords so Shay would rank organically for specific consumer searches like locksmith honda, ford locksmith, locksmith in Rhawnhurst and locksmith 19152.

Since most consumers visit a locksmith website on their mobile device, we needed to design with “mobile first” in mind. Therefore we customized a site for mobile devices that had more direct content that was easy to read in bite-sized portions. We also added click-to-call and click-to-text buttons in the sticky header so consumers could easily contact AMPM regardless of what part of the page they were viewing.

We also initiated a paid advertising campaign in Google Ads to help drive traffic in markets where the client did not rank organically.

43%+ Conversions and 12%+ Increase in ROI

Organically and in the local Maps, the results were astounding with top Google ranking for primary consumer search terms. The specific pages we created quickly gained first page ranking in most of those areas as well.

With relevant ads that gave us high quality scores, exhaustive keyword research and several secret PPC strategies we’ve learned over the years, we were able to achieve an average conversion rate for the client of over 43.14%.

Though most data for locksmiths show high bounce rates, AMPM Locksmith started to see a dramatic increase in traffic. Most locksmith consumers who go to the website rarely proceed to any other pages because once they find a phone number, they make the call and exit the site. This one page visit, counts as a bounce.

Nonetheless, the high conversion rate is a sign that the landing pages were working and that consumers found useful content on the website.