Marketing Bites

Optimize Your Site for Local Customers

The Google and Bing search engines have sophisticated algorithms to help identify the local intent of searchers and return results that match that intent. If connecting with local customers is important to your business, we suggest that you optimize your site for local searches by adding targeted locales (state, city, county, neighborhood, etc.) to the following elements of your webpages:

  • Title Tags: These are the titles of your webpages themselves. In most web browsers, you can see them displayed above your URL bar.
  • Page Headings: These are the headings within your webpage content.
  • Meta Descriptions: Meta Descriptions are succinct descriptions in your webpage source code (but not visible to site visitors) used by Google/Bing and sometimes displayed in their search result listings.

For example, if the text for one of these elements reads “Carpet Cleaning Services,” you might change this to “Portland Oregon Carpet Cleaning Services.”

MightyMerchant customers can edit their Meta Descriptions and Title Tags by clicking the “Optimize” link on any page in your Site Manager.

While we don’t suggest that you need to add a locale to every page of your site, it is important to keep in mind that a search with “Portland” in the query will bring up different results than the same search with “Eugene.” If there are multiple cities you would like to target, you may want to optimize a separate page for each or work a few specific locales into each page.


If you are a MightyMerchant customer, and would like to learn more about how to optimize your site using our MightyMerchant site manager, please visit our instructions on Using MightyMerchant to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines.


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About the Marketing Bite

Marketing Bites are short actionable tips to help you market your business. Each Bite contains a marketing idea and an easy to complete action. The Marketing Bite is emailed weekly to subscribers.

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