Lock Stars LLC: A Cincinnati Locksmith Site, Built and Maintained From Buffalo
Every other client in this set is a Western New York business. Lock Stars LLC is in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here is how the site is put together, and what it still carries.
What Lock Stars Does
Lock Stars LLC is a locksmith in Cincinnati, Ohio. The site presents the business as a 24/7 and same day service covering residential, commercial and automotive work, with lock installations, repairs, rekeys and key replacement. The number on the site is 513-995-4965.
The home page heading is plain about it: "Trusted Cincinnati Locksmith Services From Lock Stars LLC." The two section headings under it split the offer the way a customer already thinks about it, residential first and commercial second.
A Client Several Hundred Miles Away
AldoMedia is at 656 N French Rd #2 in Buffalo, New York, building websites since 1999. Lock Stars is in Ohio. We have never needed to stand in their shop to do this work.
Small businesses often assume a web designer has to be local. The deliverable is a set of files on a server. What has to be local is knowledge of the business, and a locksmith can tell you over the phone which jobs pay the bills. Distance changes when we talk, not what gets built, and our industry pages cover the same ground for other trades.
How the Site Is Organized
The sitemap holds 82 URLs, arranged in three layers.
- Services. A hub at
/locksmith-services-cincinnati-ohiowith residential, commercial, automobile, same day, mobile, and lock change and rekey pages under it. - States.
/ohio-locksmith,/kentucky-locksmithand/indiana-locksmith, reached through a/locksmith-service-areashub. Cincinnati sits near the corner where those three states meet, so coverage that crosses state lines is a fact about the business, not a keyword move. - Towns. Individual pages such as Amberley Village and Amelia.
Town pages need discipline. A page for a suburb has to say something true about serving that suburb, or it is the same page with the name swapped, and both the reader and the search engine can tell. That is the standard we hold work to in search engine optimization.
Beyond that: about, contact, testimonials, a frequently asked locksmith questions page, and privacy and terms. The contact form posts to a handler on the client's own server, which keeps the leads on the site they came from.
The Decisions, and Why
Structured data typed for the actual trade
The site carries JSON-LD typed Locksmith, schema.org's own subtype of LocalBusiness, together with Place, PostalAddress and OpeningHoursSpecification. Typing it as a locksmith states the trade instead of leaving it to be inferred, and the hours markup earns its place because this is a service people search for in an emergency, at an hour when nothing else is open.
The testimonials page, and what we would change
The site has a testimonials page. It currently carries per-review Review and Rating markup in its structured data, with no AggregateRating node. Removing that markup is on our list. A testimonial is the customer's statement. A star average the site owner types into a script is a different thing, and a bad trade for a business that runs on trust.
One phone number, everywhere
Every service, town and state page leads back to the same number. For an emergency trade, the measure of a page is whether someone standing in the cold can call in one tap. That is responsive design doing its job, and it is how we approach any small business website.
What the Site Still Carries
Honesty is more useful than a victory lap. The home page loads 3 stylesheets and 20 scripts. Two of those scripts are requested twice, classie.js and jquery.easypiechart.min.js. The JavaScript is jQuery 1.11.3, a 1.x release, with plugins from the same era around it: jQuery UI, Isotope, Owl Carousel, Waypoints, WOW, Easy Pie Chart and a custom Modernizr build.
None of that is broken. It is what a theme of that period looks like after years in production, and it is the list we would work down, starting with the duplicated requests.
An accessibility toolkit ships with the site. That is a feature, not a compliance finding, and we will not call any site compliant. The accessibility conversation starts with what has been fixed.
See It Live
The site is at Lock Stars LLC. The 24/7 availability, the tri-state coverage and the locksmith work are all theirs. AldoMedia built and maintains the website that presents them.
Outside Buffalo and Wondering If That Matters?
It does not. Tell us what your business does and we will tell you what your site should say, in Amherst or in Ohio.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does AldoMedia only work with Buffalo businesses?
No. Lock Stars LLC is in Cincinnati, Ohio, several hundred miles from our office in Buffalo, and it is a current client. A website is a set of files on a server, so the distance changes the scheduling of a phone call and nothing else. Most of our clients are in Western New York because that is where we are known, not because of a limit on where we work.
What is Locksmith schema and why does this site use it?
Locksmith is schema.org's own subtype of LocalBusiness, so it names the trade instead of leaving a search engine to guess it. The Lock Stars JSON-LD uses it alongside Place, PostalAddress and OpeningHoursSpecification. For a trade people search for at two in the morning, machine readable hours and location are the parts of the graph worth getting right.
Is there star rating or review markup on the site?
Yes, in one place. The testimonials page carries per-review Review and Rating markup in its structured data, though there is no AggregateRating node. Removing it is on our list. AldoMedia does not publish rating markup for itself, and a star value encoded by a site owner is not something a website should vouch for.
Is the Lock Stars site finished?
No site is. The home page currently loads 3 stylesheets and 20 scripts, two of them requested twice, on top of jQuery 1.11.3 and a set of older jQuery plugins. An accessibility toolkit ships with the site, which is a feature and not a compliance finding. We would rather publish that list than call the site flawless.