More Locksmith Calls is an independent publication for people who own a locksmith business and want the phone to ring with real customers, not lead resellers and not someone three states away offering to rank them on page one.
Who edits it
Steven Von is the editor. He has spent several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, including locksmiths doing residential lockouts, commercial door hardware and automotive key work. He has also watched the locksmith category get abused on Google harder than almost any other trade, which shapes what is written here. The guides assume you are a real shop with a real van and a license where your state requires one.
Where the benchmark numbers come from
The benchmark report is built from public Google Business Profile listings. We search Google Maps for locksmith businesses in every US state and the District of Columbia, record the public fields on each listing (review count, star rating, website link, hours, primary category, city and state), remove duplicates by place, and compute the statistics on the report. We do not log in to anything, we do not keep personal data, and we do not store reviewer names.
The dataset currently holds 12,373 listings across 51 states and is refreshed monthly. One caution: the locksmith category on Google contains listings that are not real shops, and we cannot verify every address, so read each figure as a picture of what searchers see, accurate to within a point or two, not as a census of licensed locksmiths.
Editorial rules
- No pay-to-play. No shop, supplier, software or agency can buy a mention, a recommendation or a place in any list on this site.
- Every number is sourced. It comes from our dataset, from a Google help page, or from a government source, and it is linked or named. If a figure is an estimate from our own campaign work, it is given as a range and labeled as one.
- Opinions are marked as opinions. "We think" means we think.
- Guides are written for an owner who answers the phone from the van. If a step needs a full-time marketing person, it does not go in.
- Every guide is dated and updated when Google, Meta or the AI assistants change something that matters.
How the free 14-day trial works
Every service on this site, from Google Ads to missed-call text-back to bookkeeping, can be tried free for 14 days. You text or call (385) 486-5394, we do a short setup call, and the service runs in your own accounts for two weeks. No card is taken. On day 14 it stops unless you say to keep it, at the monthly price quoted before the trial started.
The trial exists because of how this trade usually gets sold: a six-month contract and a setup fee before anyone has proved they can make the phone ring. We think an owner should see calls, recordings and a cost per call first, in their own account, and only then decide. If the two weeks produce nothing, you have lost a setup call and nothing else.
More on the FAQ.