Getting Found on the Internet

No business can survive for long if customers can’t find them. At one time, word of mouth referrals were the only way for a business to expand to new customers. But even then, a very satisfied customer would normally tell only two or three other people about your business. On the other hand, a dissatisfied customer would tell nine other people about a bad experience. Today, word of mouth is still the best way to earn and keep loyal customers, but we sometimes forget that fact because there are so many new ways to reach out to people. With all of the websites that now publish business reviews, a single dissatisfied customer can reach thousands of people with just a few mouse clicks. Now it’s more important than ever to please each and every customer. But, since that is impossible to do, it’s also important that you promote those customers who are pleased with your services. You also have to respond to complaints as they arise and do all that you can to minimize them.

Way back in the twentieth century, the “Yellow Pages” were the most important and often the most expensive advertising that a locksmith could do. Most new customers found you based solely on your Yellow Pages listing. Competition to be first in the listings prompted people to choose names like A-1, AAA, or even AAAAA-Plus for their businesses because Yellow Pages listings were alphabetical. But even back then it took more than just being the first in the listings to build a business. Competition was hot for larger and more elaborate display ads. Those who could afford it would even take out full page ads even though the cost for that ad might be the single largest overhead expense for their business.

Today, locksmith businesses live or die by their “Google Placement.” Sure, there are lots of other search engines out there, but Google is definitely the “Elephant in the Room.” If you can get a good placement on Google, the others search engines will follow suit with little or no effort on your part. The clout that Google has in the Internet advertising world is hard to overestimate. But even though most of us use Google searches regularly in our daily lives, many of us do not understand that each page in the search results can be broken down into three separate types of listings. Let’s take a minute to look at a typical “Search Engine Result Page” (SERP) for the search term “Locksmith.”

Google Searches

As you know, the page displayed after a search is much larger than most monitors can display, so I’ve broken the result down into three segments. In the top segment (Photo 1), all that we can see are paid advertising results. Clicking on these links is what generates over 75% of the billions of dollars that Google earns each year. Most of these listings are “Pay per Click” (PPC), and the advertisers are charged each time a link is clicked. The cost per click is set by the terms of the advertising campaign, and budgets are negotiated to control the overall cost. As an example, if a business set a budget of $50 per day for their advertising campaign, with a cost of $.25 per click, that would mean that the link would appear in the SERP until it had been clicked on 200 times. Once the budgeted amount has been reached, the link would not appear again on that particular SERP until the next day.

The advertising campaigns are generally run by a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company. Most, but not all, SEOs are “Google Partners,” which Google defines as: “Google's program for advertising agencies, digital marketing professionals, and other online consultants. By joining Partners, you can access special events and trainings, industry research, Google AdWords product updates, and free certification exams and study materials.” Basically, Google Partners have and understand the inside information to make a Google search effective.

If you have been in business for any length of time, you have no doubt received numerous calls (usually robotic calls) from SEOs offering to put your business on “the first page on Google.” Understand that the only way that an SEO can guarantee you a placement on the first page of any SERP is by way of a pay per click advertising campaign. Generally, a PPC advertising campaign is broken down into individual search terms, so if you want to be found under “Locksmith” and “Locksmith for Cars,” that would be two separate SERPs that you would have to plan and budget for. A PPC advertising campaign is something that you need to think about very carefully if you are on a shoestring budget.

If you look at Photo 1 again, you will also see that the results are divided into two columns. Each position in each column is determined by a complicated algorithm based on a variety of factors. The left hand column is the “prime real estate” of the SERP and it normally contains up to three listings. The right hand column contains many more listings, and many of these listings are for Internet service companies such as YP, Local.com, Angie’s List, etc. These services advertise under particular search terms; clicking on one of these listings will take you to another site that may or may not look like another search engine. Once there, you will generally see a list of businesses that are paying for placement within this sub-listing for a particular search term.

Depending on the search term, there may or may not be a map included in the top portion of the SERP, but if there is, the pointers on that map will correlate to the advertisers on that page. Most of the information / ads at the top of the page will be repeated on each subsequent page. Individual ads may change from page to page in a rotation determined by the search engine algorithms.

Photo 2 shows what you would see by scrolling down to the next section on the SERP. Here you can see the information linked to the various pointers on the map, and the continuation of the right hand column of the paid listings.

Under the map section begins the “Organic” section of the SERP. These listings are not paid listings, but they may have an SEO company actively working to improve the visibility of the various companies listed there. The use of the “Organic” term for this section of the SERP, indicates that it is constantly changing depending on a host of factors. If you are trying to promote your own website, without the help of a SEO, this is the section of the SERP where your site will appear. Just because a listing is in the organic section, it doesn’t mean that the owner of that listing is not using an SEO company to increase the ranking of their listing.

The order of the listings in the organic section of the SERP is determined by complex algorithms developed by the search engine company. In this case that would be Google. Photo 3 shows the continuation of the organic listings. Notice that some of these listings are for clearing house sites such as YP and ALOA. Once again, clicking on these links will normally take you to a sub-listing where you can choose from various advertisers, or in the case of ALOA, ALOA members.

Spiders, Bots, & Crawlers

Each search engine company uses sophisticated software to search the web continuously. These software programs “crawl” over websites looking for very specific things, and then report back to the various search engines with what they find. The data returned by these programs is then used to determine the ranking order for websites in a SERP. These programs are called Spiders, Bots, or Crawlers, but most often you’ll hear them referred to as Spiders.

As the spiders crawl over your web page, they’re looking for very specific things, and if you make sure that all of those things are present, your page will rise in the rankings. One of the most important things that the spiders look for is to make sure that your website is being updated on a regular basis. The best way to slip down in the rankings for your SERP is to let your website sit idle. So, if you are really serious about getting listed higher in the SERP, you MUST update your site constantly. And naturally, that is one of the things that a SEO company will do for you, but you can also do this yourself if you have the time and skills.

Another thing that the spiders look for is links to other websites in your industry. Including links to companies that manufacturer locks, hardware, keys, etc. will help boost your ratings. Including links to related local organizations such as your local chamber of commerce, homeowners associations, board of realtors, etc. will help you more and if you can get those local organizations to include a link back to your webpage in return, it will help even more.

Keywords or AdWords are also very important. Be sure to include any of the keywords that you hope to be found by in the text on your site, preferably on the home page. For example, if you install panic hardware and expect people to search for you under the heading “panic hardware installation,” then make sure that you use that exact phrase at least once on your site. Below are two sample sentences to illustrate what I mean:

Wrong - We specialize in installing only UL Listed panic hardware from the leading manufacturers.

Right - We specialize in panic hardware installation using only UL listed hardware from the leading manufacturers.

The Spiders are only going to notice phrases that exactly match the search phrases, so make sure that you use those search phrases as much as possible in the text on your site.

Photos, videos, and graphics will also give your site a boost. If you have videos of your own that you can embed in your site, or you post videos to YouTube and link them to your site, it will help you in the ratings. Original graphics, as opposed to clip-art graphics found on the web, are the best kind of graphics. Remember that the graphics should appeal to humans looking at your site as well as the spiders so add as much personality as possible. Photos of your vehicles, staff, work in progress, etc. usually work better than a clip-art shot of a pretty girl holding a key that may appear on a thousand other locksmith sites.

Reviews are probably the single most important thing that you can put on your site. These are not only important to your customers, but also to the spiders. In order to get the best reviews, you have to make it easy for the customer to leave a review. Only dissatisfied customers will make a big effort to leave a review. If you make the process easy and simple, most people today are more than happy to leave a good review if the job merits it.

You can set yourself up on the major review sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List, Google Local, Yahoo Local, Trustpilot, TrustLink, etc. The more review sites you are on, the more reviews you will get. Once you’re set up, include links to the review sites on your website, your email signature, on your invoices, business cards, etc.

Then, ask for reviews! Make asking for a review a part of every job with a satisfied customer. If you have multiple employees, let them know that you expect them to ask for reviews. You can even give your employees an incentive, such as a periodic bonus based on the number of positive reviews submitted. You simply cannot have too many reviews! Another bonus to having lots of positive reviews is that the occasional negative review will be overwhelmed by the positive reviews.

Links to social media such as Facebook and Twitter are also things that the spiders look for. They are also good places to get reviews posted. If you’re not on social media, then you are missing out on a lot of free publicity and a boost for your site. It’s not necessary to spend a lot of money on social media, but it does take time. In fact, most of the things that I’ve pointed out above can be done on the cheap if you like, but added together they will take a lot of your time.

Nothing says that you have to do all of these things personally. You can hire a SEO company to take care of most of these things. And one advantage of using an SEO is that they stay current with what the spiders are looking for and can help you promote your site and improve the ranking of your SERP.

In many cases, it’s possible to hire a local college student to do the same thing for pennies on the dollar for what you would pay an SEO. An acquaintance of mine has a one-man shop in a small town, but his website consistently outperforms the larger businesses in the surrounding area. His secret is that his wife spends most of her free time during the day tinkering with his website.

That constant tinkering and changing, monitoring and posting reviews, and working social media is exactly what the spiders are looking for. The choice is yours; if you want your website to preform, it will cost you, either in time or money and most likely both.

Buyer Beware

Just because an SEO can boost your website performance, it doesn’t mean that they will. It’s like the Wild West out there when it comes to SEO companies. There are good ones, bad ones, and very bad ones. Do your research before you sign any contract. Some SEO companies use techno-babble to try to confuse potential customers, and if that doesn’t work they move on to made-up statistics that seeming show that I will be bankrupt without them. Do NOT let them rush you into a quick decision. If it’s a good deal today, it will still be a good deal tomorrow. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Allow me to give you one example of a sales call I got recently. The caller told me that he represented a company that could give me an exclusive listing on my local newspaper’s website and that they only had one position open for a locksmith. He said that he could give me a link directly from the paper’s website to my site, and that it would be “prominently listed.” While I had him on the phone, I searched for his company, any reviews of his company, and for examples of what they had done in the past. It turned out that what he was trying to sell me was a link inside an ad that was buried at the bottom of the newspaper site. The link said nothing about locksmiths, but rather said something about local merchants. Clicking on that ad would take you to a listing that looked a lot like a traditional phone book listing for every service you could imagine. On top of that, I couldn’t find one positive review of the company, and many of the negative reviews actually talked about taking legal action against this company. Needless to say, I didn’t do any business with the guy, but I later discovered that another local locksmith did, much to his regret.

I have learned a lot about web advertising in the past few years and the one thing that I know for sure is that I still have a lot to learn. Web advertising is a complex subject and no one should feel ignorant just because they don’t understand how some of it works. But, if you are serious about building your business, you HAVE to have some kind of web advertising campaign. I promise that you will make mistakes, but you will learn from those mistakes. The best plan is to learn from other people’s mistakes by thoroughly researching any company that you plan to partner with. Hopefully you’ll skip over some of the mistakes I’ve made.