Written by Beth When you launch your site, Carrot automatically personalizes your site with several pieces of information you provide in the activation process.
You will be asked questions about your company and local market area when setting up your main account. This information is then used as the default company information when you launch new Carrot sites.
In this tutorial, we’ll explain how shortcodes are used at Carrot and how to change the default information that gets automatically used by these shortcodes on your site. Let’s go!
A Quick Overview of Shortcodes & How They Work
We use “shortcodes” to make localizing and personalizing your site quick and easy.
When editing your site, you’ll come across content in brackets like this… [[shortcode example]]
In fancy tech-speak, a shortcode is a phrase between two brackets that tells our system when to insert another word or phrase in its place.
These brackets are replaced with key information automatically across the entire site with information you provided such as target city, target state, company name, company phone number, etc.
This allows us to launch a partially personalized site for you out of the box:
For example: The shortcode [company], means that anywhere it is used on your website, it’ll automatically insert your company name. One of the most valuable shortcodes is the city you do business in, or [market_city], this is the city you see listed on your site when it’s launched.
You can find the key information you entered in your site’s dashboard settings.
✅ Click here to confirm your site’s information →
It is important we get this right!
When you’re getting started, we don’t recommend deleting your shortcodes. This way you only have to update the info once in the settings area, and anywhere and everywhere you see that shortcode will be updated automatically on the live site. You can also easily make changes whenever your business changes by using the shortcode feature.
However, if you want more control you can delete the shortcodes and replace them with the word directly.
Also make sure to ONLY use a single city, state, and zip in these fields, otherwise, you will generate pages with bad SEO performance and a poor user experience.
ℹ️ Click here for a complete list of shortcodes used on Carrot sites →
How To Update The Default Information Used By Shortcodes
Now, let’s learn how to change the default information that gets automatically used by these shortcodes on your site:
Step 1: Access your Site’s Main Dashboard
Find the site you want to update and click the Dashboard arrow to go to the main area for that site.
Step 2: Edit the Settings to Update Your Company Info
Once you’re in your site’s dashboard – just hop on over to the second-to-last gray link on the left that reads “settings” and you can update all settings there.
You’ll be able to update all information on this page including: phone number, market city, the admin email leads are sent to, and more.
Note: Be sure to save your changes at the bottom right of the page before proceeding to the next steps!