How To Use Local Business

How to use local business (and spot nationwide businesses that claim to be local)

When you need to call out a service based business you’ll probably search in Google “Emergency Locksmith” or “Local Locksmith” and so on. Now Google, or any other such search engine will show you a number of pages with details of various business in your local area. Within those pages will be nationwide companies advertising themselves as local businesses. Nationwide companies will have a much larger marketing budget as oppose to the genuine local businessman/woman whose budget will be much smaller in comparison giving them an unfair advantage.

How can you spot these nationwide companies?

It’s pretty easy. Type into a Google search “Shoreham locksmith”, the top businesses appear to be local to Shoreham-by-Sea but in fact the top three are all London based businesses, misleading to say the least.

How do these nationwide businesses get away with this?

Well, there’s absolutely nothing stopping them. They pay Google to use the word “Locksmith” and regardless of whether they are genuinely local to your area or not this will put them ahead of genuine local businesses on any Google search containing the word “Locksmith”.

This issue is not location specific, whether you’re searching a local term like lockout in hove or a national term like UK locksmith services, the national companies will still show up.

What I’d like to see is the local community using local businesses for services. By all means use Google for your search but have a good look around the businesses website for contact details. If they are genuinely local you’ll recognise their trading address, if the address is miles away then ask them where is their local head office or trading address.

As a genuine, local, independent business we want to advertise the fact that we are local and wish to serve the local community in a way that word of mouth is passed along in the local community. We at Seymour Locksmiths are big supporters of using local businesses and in doing so we also support our local community.

So please check before calling that ad

Search for your local business

Check the Add at the top of page one

Ask where the head office is located

Is that my local dialling code?

Ask yourself is this businesses genuinely local to me?

Update April 2019 – I have updated and expanded on the points here in my most recent blog post.