Digital Insights

Google recently released a video covering on how local businesses are ranked and how new features like Tags, Boost may not impact the ranking of organic listings. However claiming and having your business profile properly setup (categories, address, photos, reviews) on Google Places should be essential in starting your local search optimization efforts.

Factors Google looked into include:

• Relevance - i.e. Search for Coffeshops - zooming down to coffeshops around the destinated location search term and omitting irrelevant business categories such as retailers, dry cleaners etc
  
• Prominence - how well known the local business search term ("i.e. coffeeshops in Union Square) is based on reviews from external sites such as yelp etc
  
• Distance - the nearby local business to the particular search term ("i.e. coffeeshops in Union Square)

As always we should take this video with a grain of salt,especially its a publicly available video. Given the fact that giving away any specific ranking factors might give their competitors a heads up and not forgetting the spammers trying to game the system.