How would you associate location data with a post?

I don’t know why you think storing data in database would be sloppy, that’s after all what they are for. There is nothing wrong with doing that.

Since the lat/long is unlikely to change unless there is a cataclysmic earth moving event, the data can be considered pretty static, you’re not going to re-query Google once you get the initial lat/long.

An alternative way is to store it in a .json file or better store it an array (json) and cache it (this is what I do), since your most likely using Javascript to read the values into a map, especially if your reading tons of values.