Bait pricing is a click strategy, not a price.
A very low advertised figure is not attempting to describe the job. It is attempting to win a comparison that takes place in about eight seconds, between three results, by somebody who is stressed and cannot evaluate anything else.
The price is set at the door instead, at which point the customer has already waited, has already stopped calling anybody else, and is in the worst possible position to negotiate. The advertised number was never a price. It was a way to end their search.
This is why matching it does not work. You would have to either lose money on every job or adopt the same practice, and adopting it puts you in a category that platforms are actively policing.
The alternative is not a different number. It is refusing to compete on that axis at all, and giving the customer something else to compare.
You will lose clicks. That is the mechanism working, not failing.
A published range filters your traffic before the phone rings. The people it turns away were going to turn themselves away twenty seconds into a call, having cost you the interruption.
What a low number buys
The click, and an angry customer at the door. Frequently a review that describes the experience in detail.
What a range buys
Fewer calls, a higher proportion of them booked, and a conversation that starts from agreement rather than from a number.
What silence buys
The worst of both. The customer assumes the worst, calls the shop that answered, and you never know it happened.
Fewer calls, more money.
The objection to publishing prices is always volume. The answer is that volume is the wrong measure, and the arithmetic is easy enough to check against your own numbers.
A shop that publishes nothing, compared with one that publishes a range
Same market, same quality of work, same advertising spend. The only difference is whether the price range is on the website. What changes is not the number of jobs, it is how many phone calls were needed to get them and how the customer felt when the technician arrived.
- CALLS, NO PRICES
- 100
- CALLS, WITH RANGES
- 62
- JOBS BOOKED, EITHER WAY
- ~28
Illustrative scenarios, not client results. No figures on this page describe a real customer.
The shape of that model is the point rather than the specific numbers, which are illustrative. Publishing a range removes calls that were never going to convert, and it leaves the bookings roughly where they were.
What it changes is everything downstream. Thirty-eight fewer interruptions during jobs. No conversations that end in a price disagreement. A customer who accepted the figure before the van was dispatched, which is a materially different person to deal with at the door.
It also changes the reviews, and in a trade where the map is most of the business, that eventually changes the ranking too. Not as a lever, as a consequence.
A range, and what moves it.
The format matters. A single number invites a dispute and a vague sentence invites suspicion. A range with its variables stated does neither.
| JOB | TYPICAL RANGE | SAY WHAT MOVES IT |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency lockout | $85 to $150 | Time of day, distance, and the type of lock. |
| Residential rekey | $120 to $250 | Number of cylinders and whether hardware is being kept. |
| Lock installation | $180 to $600 | Hardware grade and whether the door needs preparation. |
| Car key replacement | $150 to $400 | Vehicle year and make, and whether any key still exists. |
| Fob or smart key programming | $200 to $600 | Platform, and whether all keys are lost. |
| Safe opening | $350 to $2,000 | Type and condition, and whether documentation exists. |
| Commercial door hardware | $1,500 to $8,000 | Door count, grade required, and code obligations. |
| Master key system | $2,000 to $15,000 | Number of doors and levels of access in the hierarchy. |
These are trade-typical bands rather than your prices, and they will not match every market. Replace every figure with your own. The structure is the transferable part: a range, then the one or two variables that move it, in a sentence a customer can act on.
A price you honor is a legitimacy signal.
In a category where the defining complaint is that the advertised price was not the price, publishing a range you actually charge is not just a conversion tactic. It is the clearest available statement that you are a different kind of operation.
It is also uncopyable in a useful way. An operator whose model depends on the door-step number cannot publish an honest range without ending the model, which means this is one of the few advantages that cannot simply be matched.
Put it in the map profile too
A stated range visible before the click does the filtering earlier, which is where it does the most good.
Train the phone to repeat it
A published range undermined by a different figure on the call is worse than no range at all.
Honor it at the door
The entire value of this is that the number survives contact with the job. One exception costs a review that lasts years.
Review it annually
An out-of-date range is a promise you will eventually have to break. Put it in the calendar.
The objections.
Will publishing prices lose us calls?01
Yes, deliberately, and mostly the ones you did not want. The calls you lose are the ones that were only ever going to ask the price and hang up. The calls you keep arrive already knowing roughly what they will pay, which shortens the conversation and raises the proportion that turn into work.
Our prices vary. How can we publish a number?02
Publish a range and state what moves it. "Residential rekey, $120 to $250, depending on the number of cylinders and the hardware" is more useful than a single figure and more honest than silence. Customers are not looking for a quote, they are looking for reassurance that the answer is not going to be four times what they expected.
What if a competitor advertises far less than we charge?03
Then you are being compared against a number, and the useful response is context rather than a matching number. Explaining what a job actually involves and what determines the price is a page a bait advertiser cannot write, because writing it honestly would end their own model.
Does this help with search rankings?04
Indirectly, and the indirect effect is substantial. Pricing pages attract searches with the word cost in them, they keep people reading, and they earn the kind of links and mentions that thin service pages never get. The primary benefit is conversion quality rather than ranking.
Should commercial prices be published too?05
Ranges, yes, with heavier qualification. A commercial buyer expects a survey and a quote, but they still need to know whether a master key system is a two thousand dollar decision or a fifteen thousand dollar one before they take it to somebody with a budget. Publishing that band gets you into the conversation earlier.
Published 2026-08-06. Ungated, with no email required to read it. Search platform requirements change; anything here describing a platform process was accurate at the time of writing and should be checked against the current documentation before you act on it.
Find out where you actually stand.
Send us what you charge and what you currently publish. We will tell you which ranges to put up first and what we would expect that to do to the mix of calls you take.