Geolocation and local SEO the future of digital marketing

The future of marketing will increasingly be linked to geolocation via IP. This is what the Digital Element report revealed

The online advertising in recent years has grown exponentially, thanks to the increase of services specifically designed to meet the target and increasingly sophisticated platforms. Once messages were spread without selecting the audience segment in detail, now habits, type of device used, online behaviors and even the position in the space of the potential customer are taken into account.

According to the report created by Digital Element in collaboration with GSMA and published on Mobile World Live, digital marketing will increasingly focus on geolocation carried out not only with GPS but via IP address, which is considered reliable and safe for the user and very effective for the advertiser. This will also and above all bring benefits to the Local Seo branch. Here’s what the report reveals in detail and what the opportunities are for companies.

The role of Geolocation in the future of Digital Marketing

The analysis conducted by Digital Element has an evocative title “ Targeting and trust. How IP geotargeting can help solve digital marketing’s current issues “and precisely focuses on the opportunities offered by IP geolocation to overcome the traditional difficulties of marketing, those related to the decline in interactions, scandals related to privacy, but also to the monopoly of the offer.

The value of digital marketing is now enormous: according to eMarketer in the United Kingdom 19 billion dollars were spent in 2019 alone, an increase of 16% compared to 2018, while the figure rises to 333 billion dollars globally. In short, investments increase, consequently marketing must live up to expectations, providing safe and growing results. This is a difficult challenge, considering that we are not talking about an exact science, but a discipline made up of strategies, indicators of growth, accumulation and reading of data and so on. It is also necessary to consider that there are several critical points to overcome, such as privacy management or the calculation of results through indices that guarantee exact values.

According to the report by Digital Element, it will be precisely the geolocation that offers satisfactory solutions: it will allow an advertiser to know where his potential customer is and therefore offer him a personalized experience based on the context. Location-based advertising can take advantage of GPS, but that’s not all. In fact, if a person doesn’t have this feature active on their device, tracking them down is difficult. So in the future the advertisements will take into consideration another parameter: the IP address that is used to profile the user by going back to the postal code, guaranteeing anonymity, therefore without invading his privacy.

Not to mention that the IP also allows you to trace the type of device, the connection speed, and the telephone operator. In this way, brands have additional information, useful for creating targeted ads, increasing the possibility of having a higher CTR.

Finally, the IP will allow to improve the activities related to Local SEO , a trend that in recent years — and also with the Quarantine — has become increasingly sought after and exploited by companies.

Local SEO: why is geolocation essential?

The Local SEO is a branch of Search Engine Optimization quite young but full of potential, which will become increasingly important in the future. It is used to improve the ranking of a web page in the local search results list. It is widely exploited by those who have a restaurant, a clothing store, a club or any business that must refer to customers in the vicinity to survive.

This type of research has intensified in recent years. At first, to find a nearby business it was necessary to write the name of the place in the search bar, for example “Pizzeria Roma”. Now, however, thanks to geolocation it is also possible to simply write “Pizzeria” and the engine will automatically offer the nearest places.

The improvement of geolocation — thanks to the exploitation of IP — will make it possible to offer increasingly clear and targeted results. On the other hand, during the quarantine, the search for nearby shops or restaurants, which did home delivery or take-away service, has increased exponentially, so it is clear that proximity marketing will have a crucial role in the coming years. Companies must therefore update themselves and know how to take advantage of new technologies and functionalities: at stake is customer interception, increased sales and growth of their business.