Maponics Blog

Get Your SEO In The Right Neighborhood

by Guest Blogger: Andrew Shotland, LocalSEOGuide.com on June 22, 2011 at 11:37AM

I don’t have to tell you that the local search industry is growing like crazy.  The competition for ranking in Google and other search engines is getting particularly fierce as more and more entrants take the field.  And with the growth of smartphones, you now have to worry about your mobile rankings too.  While it sounds scary, there are still plenty of opportunities for smart marketers to use data to outfox their competition when it comes to local SEO.

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.

First Release of Subdivision Boundaries

by Steve DuScheid, Marketing Director on June 15, 2011 at 1:47PM

Yesterday, Maponics released the first version of our ground-breaking Subdivision Boundaries product.  We’ve been working with companies in the real estate industry for years and now provide data to power the geographic search for many of the top players (read more about related survey results).

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.