Here’s how the new service works:

When you type in a general search like ‘IT support’, Google will continue to display listings in the same way it always has. But if you type in a locally-focused search like “IT support Chicago,” Google will automatically change its display to a Google Place Search page. Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, it shares a lot of similarities with the Google Places “onebox” that currently appears: local business listings appear next to a map, with a corresponding red pin indicating where they’re located in that geographic area. The big difference is, the new Google Place Search page eliminates all the non-local listings from the page and includes a lot more information for the local listings that are displayed.

What this means for you: since Google is displaying a lot more local listing content on its Place Search pages, it stands to reason that they’ll give strong preference to displaying Places pages that already have lots of content first. It also stands to reason that if your small business’s website appears at #1 in the organic search results for a local query, but has no Google Places listing (or a poorly-optimized local listing), you’re about to lose a lot of market reach.

We’ve recommended that small businesses optimize their local search listings for a long time on Small Business Tech Tips – the new Google Place Search results are a perfect illustration of the benefits of having a well-optimized local listing. If you haven’t claimed and optimized your business, do it! And keep in mind, it’s not just about optimizing the Google Local Business listing itself – the more directories across the web that include your listing, and the more reviews your business has garnered at various different sites, the more content Google will pull in.

The read the full announcement from Google, click here.

Each year David Mihm surveys a number of top SEO practitioners regarding the local listing results they’ve seen, and compiles all the data into a list. The result is a comprehensive explanation of almost all the factors that contribute to a local business’s Google Places position.

Today, Mr. Mihm released the 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors. Anyone in the business of local internet marketing should stop what you’re doing right now and give it a read. You’ll learn a lot.

Last week, a new service called ChoiceVendor launched. Essentially, it’s the Yelp for B2B companies. Businesses of any size can create an account on ChoiceVendor and review other businesses they’ve worked with.

The implications for small and medium-sized businesses here are huge. As you know, Google Places leverages reviews from across the web to determine a company’s star ranking (hence, the importance of sites like Yelp for locally-focused businesses). Every positive review on Yelp can be extremely valuable to a company’s local search ranking, since Google places extra weight on listings with reviews.

Additionally, there’s an intangible value – the value of trust. If a customer finds a company where customers have gone out of their way to write 4- and 5-star reviews, they’re more likely to consider that company to do business with.

Which brings us back to ChoiceVendor. Up until now, small businesses haven’t had a great venue for their clients and customers to post reviews. With the deployment of this new service, that all changes. We expect to see Google indexing ChoiceVendor’s reviews sometime in the near future. If you have clients who operate in the B2B world, they would do well to make sure they have a claimed listing on ChoiceVendor, and try and solicit reviews from happy clients.

In the long run, the dividends will be huge.

**UPDATE 9/23/2010 – Looks like we weren’t the only ones to take notice – as of today, the ChoiceVendor team has announced that they’ve been acquired by LinkedIn. Congrats, Yanda and Rama!

Although the service is no longer available, we wouldn’t be surprised to see something coming from LinkedIn leveraging their data and technology soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet claimed your business on LinkedIn, now’s an excellent time to do it!

Thanks to Google’s extensive API, developers for web and mobile applications can leverage the Google Local Search data in their applications. Since the mobile web is the hotbed of local search marketing, Google’s dominance is a big deal…and it’s poised to only get bigger.

For local small business advertisers, what this means is that optimizing your local listing on Google Places is crucial. But as David Mihm points out in his in-depth Local Search Ranking Factors article, since Google uses the data from other directory sites to calculate who shows up on top, it’s not enough to just optimize your Google local listing. You need to make sure you have a presence on various other directory sites, too – and that your listing is consistent across them all.

But there are thousands of online local directories – how do you find which ones you need to focus on to rank highest in Google?

The folks at SEOMoz have a great answer to that question – to find out which sites are working to help people’s Google rankings, they recommend simply doing some local searches yourself. It’s a dead simple tactic to rank higher in Google Local search results – and while it can be tedious work, the benefits gained translate directly into traffic to your local business.

The impact of reviews on local search marketing results – I think people intuitively understand that having reviews of your business is better than not having reviews, but how does it impact your local search results, and what specific strategies should you use?

The following post does a fantastic job of looking into the impact of reviews on your local search results; it’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far:

An Extremely Nifty Guide to Reviews and Local Search

Once you’ve read that one and your convinced that you need a strategy for getting more reviews, check out this great post on Online Reputation Management Strategies – The “Rate Us” Page and Local Reviews.

Mike

The implications for advertising are amazing. From Brightkite using augmented reality to serve up ads to Foursquare offering discounts when you check in at certain venues, knowing someone’s location gives you a huge amount of leverage when trying to figure out whom you should market to (and how you should do it).

But in spite of most location-based services’ desire to allow users to select their own privacy restrictions, the space is so new that best practices are still being established. And now Congress is stepping in to try and sort through it.

If you work in the local search field, you’ll definitely be affected in some way by the results of these hearings. We’ll keep you updated with any new developments.

Kipp