Maponics is pleased to both sponsor and present at this event, which is being jointly coordinated by NEURISA (New England Chapter of the Urban & Regional Information Systems Association) and VCGI (Vermont Center for Geographic Information).  Mark Dykstra, our Director of Sales, will share specifics about some of our most popular datasets.

Here are the specifics:

What:                    Vermont NEURISA Ignite Spatial

Where:                 Courtyard Marriot in Burlington, Vermont

When:                  Thursday, September 22^nd from 7-9 PM

Cost:                     Free

The image below shows homes that fall within the school attendance zone for Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington.

In addition to school boundaries, Maponics also offers neighborhood, subdivision, and ZIP Code boundaries that are ideal for Real Estate and local search sites. Read our announcement this week on the expansion of our neighborhood and subdivision boundaries to more than 300,000 here.

Interested in learning more? Contact us today at info@maponics.com or call 1-800-762-5158

In local, most companies are still playing with cities and states as the base of their main keywords.  For example, every yellow pages site out there has a URL called “New York City Restaurants” but not nearly as many are targeting neighborhood-specific queries.  If you search Google right now, you’ll see about 1.2MM URLs in its index that target “New York City Restaurants”, but only about 4,000 that target “Tribeca Restaurants”.  And if you looked for URLs that targeted similar queries for zip codes or nearby landmarks, you would see similar small numbers.

So what does this mean to you?  One of the keys to playing the long-tail local SEO game is to expand your “keyword footprint” by providing URLs on your site that target niche queries such as neighborhood and zip code searches.  And the fewer sites that target these queries, the easier it is to rank well for them.  Now it can be tricky to add that much content to your site and get it indexed and ranked properly, but if you do not have the content, you have no chance of ranking.

In mobile, we are seeing Google in particular showing results in tighter and tighter clusters around the location of the mobile browser.  This means that to rank well for mobile queries your website/URL needs to be showing signals to Google that it is in fact close to the location of the person with the phone.  One way to do this is to use highly specific keywords that reference the desired location such as a neighborhood.

While SEO is an ever-evolving game, if you don’t have the data, you’re not even in the ballpark.

LocalSEOGuide is Andrew Shotland’s blog about local search engine optimization and local marketing trends.  Andrew provides “national” and local seo services to enterprise-level sites, startups and small businesses around the world.

We’ve continued to innovate in this arena and have delivered a truly unique dataset.  Subdivisions represent the fundamental unit of geography for the residential real estate landscape.  But, until now, the real estate industry has had no reliable and systematic source for subdivision boundary data.  With wide scale coverage across the U.S., subdivision boundaries support a host of real estate services aimed at both consumers and real estate professionals that improve:

• search and display
• interactive mapping
• trend and analytics reporting
• automated valuation models

I think Darrin Clement, our CEO, said it best when he said:

“Subdivision Boundaries is an excellent example of automation, GIS expertise, and a focus on quality coming together to create a product that addresses a fundamental industry need.  I’m extremely proud of our team for developing an innovative approach that not only represents significant intellectual property, but also enables us to respond quickly to customer requests for geographic coverage and provide a new set of custom polygon services.”

For current geographic coverage details or information, Contact us.

Click here to request Sample Subdivision Boundary Data.

While previous product releases included school district and school attendance zone (SAZ) boundaries for the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), we knew from working with local school officials that they were planning a major overhaul at the SAZ level.  As a result, we’ve incorporated the entire set of changes (more than 100 SAZs) soon after they were announced.

The SFUSD educates half a million students in 170 schools.  For SFUSD, school attendance zones play an important part in determining how students are assigned to schools.  While in part of the district, a student application process is used, SFUSD uses their school attendance zones as a foundation to:

• balance demographic diversity by school
• ensure equitable access to educational opportunities
• provide transparency to the student assignment process

This is just one example of how our team here at Maponics is on the case to ensure your data reflects the world around us.  Contact us to get a sample of our School Boundaries data.

We all know that the number of online and mobile resources for real estate search have proliferated in recent years but it takes consumers time to change their habits and adopt new technology.  It appears that Web resources are now firmly embedded as the primary way for people to search for residential real estate—in fact more than 80% of respondents reported using online tools.

In a story written by the Philadelphia Inquirer about the survey, they point out that the number one online resource for real estate search were property portals and noted that “The big three among these sites were Realtor.com (64 percent), Zillow (61 percent), and Trulia (51 percent).”

We are of course pleased that the top sites all leverage Maponics location datasets to enhance search capability and provide local geographic context for areas such as neighborhood, school and ZIP Code Boundaries.  Visit our customer use case pages to read about how one of these companies uses our data.

And this summer, we will begin offering a first-of-its kind dataset containing subdivision boundaries across major metro areas.  Read more about Subdivision Boundaries.

From our Subdivision Boundaries announcement:

In suburban settings, the smallest defined area around properties is typically the subdivision—which can include everything from a few homes within a gated community to a development with hundreds of properties.  The real estate industry has long recognized that the immediate area surrounding properties significantly impacts quality of life and home values.

In the Inquirer article, they also note that driving through neighborhoods is still a common house hunting practice, although people now use online resources to winnow the list of properties they visit—saving money and precious time.  The good news here is that in addition to using our data to enhance their web sites, many of our customers also embed our data in their mobile apps to provide enhanced location context for home buyers on the go.

For more ideas about how mobile real estate apps could add cool new features based on Maponics geofences, check out this article on Directions Magazine.

“With the integration of the Maponics ZIP+4 Database, the results are incredibly reliable and precise, arming our customers with the ability to accurately target their marketing efforts using our integrated radius and donut-radius select capabilities.  The ZIP+4 match rate to precise Latitude and Longitude coordinate using our CASS Certified® engine with Maponics ZIP+4 Database is simply astounding. “

Check out the entire customer use case with screen shots here.

How can we help you improve your marketing campaigns?  Contact us.

Darrin will join Martijn Beijk of Onetomarket and Philippe Huysmans from Microsoft, as a panelist for the “What’s New In Local & Mobile” session.

Planning to attend the SMX Advanced London?  Don’t miss this great session! Details below:

Vertical SEM Track

What’s New In Local & Mobile – According to Google, as many as 30% of all search queries have local intent. And according to IDC, more internet-capable mobile devices will be sold this year than computers. In short, local and mobile are both here and huge, and will continue to be an important part of many search marketer’s activities. This session looks at new developments in local search, location services, mobile apps and ads.

Date: Tuesday, May 17^th.
Time: 3:00pm-4:15pm
Location: Millennium Gloucester Hotel & Conference Centre in London.

• Coverage of locally-sourced neighborhoods has increased by over 10,000 polygons with coverage expansion in more than seventy new cities, including Broomfield, CO, Rocklin, CA, Blue Springs, MO and Prince George, BC.  As of this release, coverage in North America includes over 120,400 neighborhoods in 49 states, in the District of Columbia and Canada.

• Washington, D.C. and the Miami, FL metros were a focus of existing coverage expansion, with more than 1,000 neighborhoods added in each of these metro areas.

• As is true for all Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries product releases, U.S. Census files are included at no additional charge.  Starting with the 1.11.1 product release, Canadian Census files and accompanying product documentation are also included at no additional charge.  The Canadian Census files include Provinces, Divisions and Subdivisions.

In addition to the update to North American neighborhoods, we also released our latest version of Neighborhood Boundaries in Europe, adding over 1,000 new neighborhoods in 15 new cities.

Check out the new release on our neighborhood boundaries demo page or contact us for a neighborhood data sample.

Enjoy and feel free to post comments below.

This week, HotPads announced an enhanced real estate search capability that allows its visitors to search for houses and apartments by school attendance zones.  According to their CEO (Matt Corgon), “We understand how important schools are for home shoppers. Many of our users actually ranked schools as the most important factor when searching for a new home. At HotPads, we’re passionate about empowering users with the best tools and data to help make finding a new home easier—showing home shoppers exactly which schools their kids will attend is really a first in the industry and a natural next step for HotPads.”

This is a great example of the value of Maponics School Boundaries.

Also, Estately, another real estate search portal, recently announced their roll-out of school attendance boundaries on their site.  According to the Estately blog, Nearly a quarter (21%) of respondents to a survey of home buyers conducted by the National Association of Realtors in 2008 indicated that school related issues are a deciding factor in their selection of a home. Estately is proud to offer our new Smart Schools feature as a tool for all home buyers, regardless of their preferences for certain school districts or their familial status.

And finally, today, we announced that the National Association of Realtors (NAR) will offer schools and school boundaries to their members through the Realtors Property Resource (RPR) toolset.  Read more about how realtors will leverage schools data.

These are just a few examples of how Maponics School Boundaries are quickly becoming the standard for companies looking to offer a comprehensive and current school boundaries dataset.