I mentioned earlier this week that hyperlocal has more to do with advertising than content but didn't really explain how this can be accomplished. Luckily for me, Chris Silver Smith penned a post over at Search Engine Land that covered this very well called, "Geolocation: Core To The Local Space And Key To Click-Fraud Detection."
It's a must-read for understanding what can be detected about a web visitors location that may be valuable from an advertising perspective.
Smith's article focuses on technical ways to determine a visitor's geolocation. However, there are other methods that can achieve similar results. Here are two:
1. Ask: Many news sites require registration, yet few seem to be using the data gathered during registration to serve geotargeted ads. With only 4 fields, a registrant could be asked for an email, password, home zip and work zip. Do any sites today tell their ad sales staff, "we have 20,000 daily readers who work in 55344. Go sell some lunch special ads to a restaurant in that zip."
2. Hyperlocal content: If the content you're creating is truly hyperlocal, such as sports scores for rec teams, it's safe to assume that the people consuming that content are the participants and their close relatives. Selling and serving ads from team sponsors would make more sense than serving yet another ad for match.com. A person's preference for certain movie theater locations could spark ad geotargeting as well.
How else could you determine the location of a site's visitors?
