The first freeze is three weeks out. A locksmith's checklist for the busiest night of the quarter
Frozen car doors, dead fobs, holiday travelers locked out of rentals. What to change on your Google profile, ads and phone before the first hard freeze and Thanksgiving weekend.
Somewhere between the second week of November and the first week of December, most of the country gets its first hard freeze. That night, and the morning after, a locksmith's phone does something it has not done since August. Car doors are iced shut. Key fobs that were marginal all autumn die in the cold. People who have never locked themselves out do it at 6:40 a.m. with the engine running to warm up the car. Two weeks later Thanksgiving weekend adds travelers locked out of rental houses and relatives locked out of the family home.
It is the most predictable spike in the trade, and most shops meet it with the same profile, ads and phone setup they had in October. Here is what to change, in the order that matters.
Say when you answer
Only 16.6% of locksmith listings show 24-hour hours on Google and 50.7% show none at all. The freeze lockout happens at 6:40 a.m. and the holiday lockout happens at 11 p.m. on a Friday. Google shows "Open now" in the map pack, and the frozen person taps the first one that says it.
If you answer early and late, set the hours that way now, including Thanksgiving Thursday through Sunday as special hours. If you do not, set real hours and put an after-hours text-back on the line so the 11 p.m. caller still hears from you within a minute. Do not list 24 hours as a bluff; the unanswered call becomes a one-star review by Saturday.
A post and a service line for the cold
Put a Google post up the week before the forecast freeze: "Frozen out of your car? We can open it without damaging the seal or the door. $65 to $120, quoted on the phone, there in about 30 minutes." Add "Frozen lock opening" and "Dead key fob replacement" as service lines with prices. Those are the exact words people type in the cold and almost no locksmith profile carries them.
On the site, one short section on the automotive page: why you should not pour hot water on a frozen lock, what you do instead, what it costs. That paragraph gets quoted by the AI assistants when someone asks "how do I get into my frozen car", with your name on the answer.
Ads: schedule and budget for the spike
If you run Google Ads, two changes for the three weeks around the freeze:
- Extend the ad schedule to start at 6 a.m. Freeze lockouts are an early-morning event and most locksmith campaigns start at 8.
- Raise the daily budget on the lockout campaign by 30 to 50% for the week of the freeze and for Wednesday through Sunday of Thanksgiving. Lower it back after. Clicks cost the same; conversion rate roughly doubles when it is 12 degrees.
Add "frozen", "fob", "key fob battery" and "remote not working" as phrase match terms. Leave the rekey campaign where it is; nobody rekeys the week of Thanksgiving.
Fobs: stock the batteries and say so
A surprising share of November "my key does not work" calls are a CR2032 battery. Carry them, charge $20 to $30 installed with a smile, and ask for the review. It is the easiest five-star in the year. For the fobs that are actually dead, your automotive page should already list the makes and prices; if it does not, this is the week.
Phone: the 6 to 8 a.m. gap
Pull your missed-call log by hour from last November. In most shops the gap is 6 to 8 a.m., when the owner is driving and the dispatcher is not in yet. Fix it for the freeze week: a headset in the van, text-back on, and if you have a second person, start them at 6:30 that week. The calculator will tell you what that gap cost last year; for a shop averaging $140 a job it is rarely less than several hundred dollars a week in the cold.
Holiday travelers
The Friday after Thanksgiving, people are locked out of short-term rentals with a host who does not answer, and out of a parent's house while the parent is at the store. Those callers are from out of town and have no idea who is real. Your license number, a marked van in the profile photos and a price on the phone win that call. Your profile's reviews win it too: a traveler reads three reviews before calling, and a review that says "charged exactly what he quoted" is the one that gets you the call.
The one thing not to do
Do not raise your lockout price for the freeze. A 25 to 50% night premium stated on the site is normal; a "surge" price on a cold morning is what the fronts do, and the review that follows says so. The freeze week is where a shop earns its spring reviews. Charge the published number, be fast, ask at the door.
If you want the hours, posts, ad schedule and text-back set before the cold hits, any of those is a free 14-day trial service. No card, text or call.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, locksmith businesses among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor