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.

If you’re interested in doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising you may be interested in Google’s AdWords Jumpstart Service

There’s no charge for the service and a Google staff member will help you setup your first AdWords campaign. They do require that you commit at least $299 to PPC spending on AdWords.

A review on WorkHappy notes that:

Overall, [jumpstart is] not a bad way to start AdWords if you’re going to do it on your own—so long as your expectations are that this is only to help you do the initial setup. It helps with about the first 15% of what you’ll need to do if you want to be successful…. It’s not designed for people who wish to have someone else set up and managed it for them. It’s for people who are willing and able to figure it all out and manage the nitty-gritty themselves, but need a little hand holding to get started.

If you do want somebody to take care of all of it, we can help. We have a new Search Engine Marketing Service that includes both pay-per-click advertising across all the major search engines as well as Internet Yellow Page premier listings. Contact Us for more information.