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.

API: Global Neighborhood Boundaries

by Steve DuScheid, Marketing Director on March 10, 2011 at 7:30PM

Last week, we kicked off a blog series featuring the Maponics Spatial API.  This week, we’ll feature the Neighborhood Boundaries dataset.  Adding neighborhood data and neighborhood boundaries to web sites and mobile apps opens up a world of possibility for real estate, search, tourism and just about any application where location context matters.  For more on how these and other industries use our data, visit our customer use case page.

The neighborhood dataset available on our API is truly unique in its size and scope.  As of the end of 2010, it contained more than 138,000 neighborhoods in thousands of cities across the globe.  That makes it the largest database of neighborhood boundary definitions ever compiled.

Here is a summary of the data available in this extensive neighborhood dataset:

• Neighborhood Name
• Neighborhood Boundary
• Neighborhood Centroid
• Neighborhood Classification*
• Country
• County
• CBSA
• MCD
• Place

*- Data available for a subset of records.

With the combination of core data fields that contain neighborhood information along with geographic reference information (e.g. Metro) about where the neighborhood is, this dataset offers a comprehensive geo stack for developers looking to add social and cultural context.

See full dataset details here.

Developers can use a variety of methods to access neighborhood data through the API.  They can be broken down into methods that:

• return attributes of spatial objects (getGeoAtt)
• return an ID of a single spatial object (getGeoID)
• return a list of IDs for multiple spatial objects (getGeoList)
• return geographic coordinates of spatial objects (getGeoPoly)

In terms of input parameters, requests can include a simple coordinate pair (lat/lon) per request or a batch of coordinates within a single request.

With such an extensive dataset and the numerous methods to access it, the Maponics Spatial API represents a powerful addition to the developer’s toolkit.

Contact us if you would like to set up a trial for the Maponics Spatial API.