HelloMetro: Neighborhood Relevancy Boosts Usage

Sorting content by neighborhoods and ZIP codes can boost usage considerably, as HelloMetro recently discovered. The 10-year-old city guide gets more than 6 million monthly unique visitors and has 1,500 local sites. In a case study published today, it said it received a 10 percent jump in traffic after it started using a neighborhood and ZIP sorting service from Maponics. Twenty-five percent of that boost, or 2.5 percent overall, was directly related to pages organized around neighborhoods and ZIP codes.

The site says its problem was that it had too much content coming in from its 50 writers and various news feeds. But it didn’t sort enough by neighborhood. Searches for subjects, names and points of interest could only be done on a metro-wide basis.

The Maponics technology for sorting neighborhood data essentially solved that. Now, searches can be conducted by neighborhood and also include such features as city resources, shopping, theater, communities, schools, jobs, and other categories. Altogether, 90,000 fully optimized neighborhood and ZIP-specific pages have been developed. There are roughly 45 neighborhoods per metro, it noted.