My questions are simple (but the answers are probably not): How do I get my website to rank well in the Google Local Business results? Can the ranking in GLBR be influenced at all? Why does the ranking of websites in the Google Local Business results differ that much from the normal/natural ranking?
The two factors I've found for local business results are (a) Location: Google likes to pick the closest address to the city. Best way to get around this is find out where google considers the city center and get the closest P.O. Box you can (b) Reviews: A pretty secondary factor, but it likes lots of positive reviews (as long as it doesn't look sketchy - 100 5 star reviews from the same IP while competitors only have 1 or 2 probably isn't gonna fly)
Wouldn't it be quite unfair if Google give a higher rank to the websites of the businesses that are the closest to the city centre? For example, if I were to look for a restaurant in London it would mean that all the restaurants that are just outside the city centre couldn't stand a chance, simply because there's a maximum of ten local businesses in the results. Getting a PO box in the city centre wouldn't do a restaurant much good, would it? Does the server location have any effect? Can this be avoided by geotagging? I noticed that for some restaurants the meta-title of their website does not match the title given in the Google Local Business listing. How come? Does the title of a website have any effect?
I dug up three articles about Google Local Search: Matt McGee from Small Business Search Marketing wrote about the Google Local Search ranking factors and gave several useful tips to increase the Google Local Search ranking, while Adam Ant wrote about how to game the Google Local Search results.
Google local business listings are fast becoming the "New" Seo for local businesses. The Google seven pack may soon be more important that traditional, organic SEO for small businesses. There are many factors that Google considers to determine ranking. If you have a specific question, please post and I will try and answer.