For local searches, Google is now including up to 10 business listings above the “organic” search results.

For high-value search phrases, organic results are heavily biased against local businesses: large companies, yellow page publishers, directories, franchisors all have a huge advantage in generating the in-bound links that drive high search engine rankings.

So this is great for local businesses, and it’s great for those searching for information on them.

It also makes clear that these Local Results are the next front in Search Engine Optimazation for small, local businesses and service providers.

So how can you get your business to a) show up in the local results and b) get a high ranking in them? Google’s not really showing their hand (beyond what they have to, like patent filings).

But Mike Blumenthal has taken an educated guess about the major factors in Google’s local results:

First, there are factors that determine whether your business is relevant to the search results:

1. Address in city of search
2. Listing confirmed by listing in Google Local Business Center or by a data licensor
3. Business categories relate to search phrase
4. Business name relates to search phrase
5. Address is confirmed by your site or a linking site

And second, there are factors that determine where your business ranks relative to other results:

1. PageRank of the business’s site
2. Number of reviews in the Google Local Business Center (quantity trumps quality)
3. Number of web references
4. Quality of web references

Take-aways?

• Get a great website
• Make sure your address is on your site
• Do best-practice SEO activities on your site (esp. focusing on “off site factors” like high-quality in-bound links)
• Create or take ownership of your business listing in Google Local Business Center
• Ask your customers to review your business on Google Local
• Get a listing with a local data provider

We’ll be paying close attention to thinking on local search rankings as it evolves.

One thing’s for sure—local results are rapidly becoming high-value real estate for local businesses.

Well, we hope.

But I have a question—how did you feel reading this headline?

One of the most fundamental copy writing lessons is “stress the benefit, not the feature.”

It turns out that recent neurological research shows that reading about a benefit makes your brain fire as if you’ve experienced it.

In other words, our brains crave beneficial copy

Getting great, high-quality inbound links is one of the most important things you can do to naturally promote your business’s website.

Our newest “sound in-bound” tip is a new service from Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks, called JumpUp

They describe it as a site “that helps new businesses get up and running quickly and successfully.” There’s lots of great information on the site that may help you with your business.

But, more importantly, they let you create profile pages, with, yep, links back to your website.

Getting a linkback from an inuit.com domain? Now that’s pretty valuable.

So go create your jumpup profile! (And don’t forget the link back to your site…)