If you target local search then you need to find every little tweak possible to lift your site’s profile within the search engines. Meta tags don’t do a lot on their own, yet little by little they can work to your advantage. Take the description tag as an example.

Your meta description tag is the first place that search engines like Google look at when determining what information to include as the snippet with your listing in search results. If the data is relevant to the search term then it used as is – if it isn’t then Google will look elsewhere on the page for more relevant data. You can make that snippet more relevant for your location by including geographical information.

Google is now looking at the user’s IP address and determining where they are in the world. Based on this information, Google will deliver results relevant to them. Even if you are not signed into a Google service such as GMail or YouTube, you will still get local results based on your IP. For example, if a user searches using a search term such as “portable storage containers” and their IP address indicates they are from Barrie – there is a good chance that Google will deliver results from the Barrie area. Results that include portable storage from North Bay would be useless for the searcher.

If your snippet stated “portable storage units in Barrie” or similar, it may just win that click from the searcher. It makes sense to include your geographical details in the snippet if you are providing a service to a particular area. The meta description tag is where you place this data and hopefully Google and the other search engines will use it.

It’s such a small change yet it can increase your traffic significantly. The more click-through you get, the higher up in the rankings you will go. If you target local search, every little tweak helps.

If you aren’t targeting local then you need to start. According to Google:

The customization of search results based on location is an important component of a consistent, high-quality search experience. Therefore, we haven’t provided a way to turn off location customization …

There is no getting around it local is important to increasing your search rankings.