This is a guest post by Lorna Li, Founder & Editor in Chief of Green Marketing TV.
It is the newest way to draw customers through your door, but is your business ready for geolocation? If you feel overwhelmed by people battling for mayorships or checking in to earn badges, not to worry – we will walk you through the basics of using geolocation on your website or blog and how to prepare your business for the new service!
How does Geolocation Work?
Geolocation software uses global positioning systems (GPS) on smartphones or unique IP addresses on visitors’ computers to identify where a person is located.
While these services are similar to positioning services, the geolocation is focused more on street addresses than on a latitudinal or longitudinal location.
Start Using Geolocation for Your Blog or Business
The best way to integrate geolocation services into your green business website is to start with a solid, SEO-friendly website hosting platform that can seamlessly integrate geolocation.
When you consider all that needs to be done before you can launch your website – completing keyword research, creating branding and messaging, purchasing a domain name and mapping website architecture, it is vital to use a hosting platform that is easy to maintain and update.
Many small business owners choose to use a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, for a hassle-free website and infinite customization options.
With WordPress, you have access to thousands of free, professional themes, such as such as the WordPress Business Turnkey theme, which incorporates both a website and blog. Small businesses are able to learn just how simple web design can be when they launched a website with the free business turnkey theme.
You can find a theme for almost any business. Check out some curated lists for the best green WordPress themes, best nonprofit themes, and free magazine WordPress themes.
Introducing Geolocation to Your Website
The best part of starting with WordPress website themes is how simple it will be to integrate geolocation into your design. WordPress offers two kinds of geolocation plugins – one that will share your location and one that will update website content so it is localized for each and every visitor.
For the first service – displaying information about your location – the Geolocation plugin automatically determines the physical place from which you are updating the website or writing a blog post and includes that location information on your website.
This service is perfect for eco-friendly travel bloggers or writers who enjoy sharing information about green businesses in their communities. With this plugin, you do not need to know the address of the place you are blogging from – WordPress will figure it out for you!
How it Works
The WP-Geolocation-JS plugin is not based on where you are located, instead, it focuses on where your website visitors are. The plugin will use your visitors’ IP addresses to glean information about where they are located, and then automatically update your web content to create localized information.
For example, a visitor in Naples will see specific references to his city, while a visitor in Nashville will see localized content for her. This plugin takes the guesswork out of writing local content – it will make your website “local†for every visitor!
Geolocation is the latest craze in the social media world and your blog or business should cash in on it immediately. Build your website using WordPress to have access to the latest geolocation software plugins. These plugins allow your visitors know where you are located and instantly localize your web content for every person who finds your site.
Your Thoughts on Geolocation
Geolocation technology is still young and is not used by many people – are you ready to jump on board to be advanced and cutting edge? Share your thoughts on how you think it could help your blog, website, or business.
24 replies on “Prepare Your Website for Geolocation with WordPress”
A plugin for Geolocation, awesome! I had no idea there was such a plugin. 🙂
Geolocation is essential. Even though we want to be worldwide, we need to realize where our readers are begin targeting them in those places. Even targeting readers in your local area can bring in a huge influx of readers which will in turn bring people in worldwide.
Local is always awesome.
Thanks for this great post!!!
Thank you. Geolocation is especially useful with local search advertising – assisting readers in finding great products and services in their local can increase advertising click through rates on your blog.
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Hey Lorna,
I can see now why so many small business owners are excited about Geolocation technology. A plugin like the WP-Geolocation-JS sounds pretty cool. Before this post I didn’t know too much about Geolocation, but I enjoyed learning some of the basics of using geolocation on my website or blog. This is definitely something I will look more into. Thanks a lot for sharing your insights, I learned a lot.
I think geolocation is poised to explode. Right now only the most forward thinking companies have embraced geolocation marketing. The vast majority of businesses have not even claimed their local search listings. A few years from now, everything will be the hyper local.
Hey Lorna excellent job. You can also use geolocation to promote your QR codes as well.
Isn’t that great?
Very Good News, Lorna Li!
I am inspired from Geolocation Plugin. I was in search of any such plugin or platform with that it can be possible to write a single post for readers from all across the world. It is very useful plugin but please let me know that how can I use any such type of plugin with Blogger Platform.
Thanks
Sorry, I dumped Blogger the moment I met and fell in love with WordPress, so I can’t tell you.
FYI: The inaccuracy of the WP-Geolocation-JS plugin lies in the fact it uses the IP address, and if I am connected to the internet through an interstate or national provider then my IP address is not necessarily in the city where I live.
Useful, yes. Always correct, no.
@Ari That is a really good point. Also true if you routinely use proxies : )
It’s certainly a nice marketing tool to have your website or blog geolocated and the wordpress plugin, does sound useful, over the recent years GPS seems to be all the go what with phones and even cameras utilising it and now blogs! Maybe it’s time to geo my own blog as well 😉
Let us know how well it works for you!
Wow, i think this is worth a try! Customers or visitors to your site will be happy knowing that you can provide local information to them. It is awesome.
I’ve actually bought a PDF that includes Geotagging as one of the on-page optimization techniques to watch out this year, (but the Dublin Core method was the one that really caught my attention). However, I haven’t really tried including it on my personal blog’s current strategy, since I wasn’t really looking up to local optimization. But now I’m thinking of playing around it 🙂
@Jason Acidre
I don’t want to pull the the comments totally off topic, but Dublin Core? Really? From what I’ve read Google isn’t using DC meta data at all. Do you know something I don’t know?
I have heard about the benefits of Geolocation in a website, but haven’t look into it so far.
Thanks for this, I love the theme by the way, the most amazing is the pop up video when people click it, as well as slider. The most part is, it is free!
Thanks
@kimi @andrew Thanks for the kind words.
@jason would love to get your feedback on how it works for you.
OK, so this is actually something new for me. I’m actually trying to figure out how this would apply to my blog. I write a blog for photographers, so how would I use the geo plugin to help me out? Would I list certain workshops in certain areas of the country and the geo location detection would display the appropriate workshops? I’m just trying to get my head around the benefits.
Hi
Great plugin. I havn’t heard about that one before. Thanks for sharing 🙂
That’s a cool plug-in but I still question about the usability of it. Currently, the plug-in just shows us where are the visitors come from and there are no APIs to make things such as displaying message based on geo-location to users to become possible.
One application of this plug-in is actually collecting how many local customers have visited a local business’s website to measure the marketing effect. However, I do not see it possible yet from the plug-in perspective. Any thoughts?
Wow, this Geo-location things sound pretty cool and interesting. I never knew there existed such a plugin for WordPress. This will certainly give business providers some extra power to pull in and make more local customers. I hope Businesses will be able to leverage the power of this plugin
Great information about geo-location, Lorna. I think local optimization is going to be more of a focus for small businesses in the future. The ability to customize your content based on the user’s location is an awesome feature. The web is such a huge virtual place and if you can make your visitors feel a little more at home then your chances of connecting with them will increase dramatically.
Thanks for the info on the plugins. I’ll be featuring this post in my weekly mashup on Monday.
I’m still not convinced by all of this geolocation stuff. I think it’s a bit of a fad for the most part, with services like Foursquare not really being worthwhile.
In the blogging world, unless your information is location specific and that location changes from time to time, then it’s pointless. You’d have to be a traveling writer, or someone that covers gigs, concerts or other types of events across the country/world for it to be worthwhile.
I think most people’s work is location-free and this technology will (and should) be lost on them. I hope people don’t start doing it just because it’s the next coolest thing.