I hve recently been researching the changes Google (and the other search engines) are making to local search. The SEs have been hammering away at local search for a few years now. Their objective is to essentially put the old paper-based Yellow Pages out of business - to become the default "go to" source for local business information.
So that makes Local Search very important for businesses targeting a local market. Real estate agents are obviously one of the most important business segments who should be up to speed on local business search.
Google's local business search strategy is based on Google Maps. When you think of it, this is probably Google's most important potential revenue source for Google Maps. As GMaps based local search becomes more dominant, it will become an important source of ad revenue.
If you use Google Maps to do a search you are using their local search system. For example, I did a search for "Waterloo Realtors" from Google.com (not the toolbar), and this is what I got:
Notice that the sponsored (paid) links are at the very top. But right under those are the "local business results". This is what we're talking about here. Google has elevated the importance of local search results so that, for location based searches, they come up ahead of the normal results we are used to.
The bottom line is that if you want to score well for location based searches you have to get into the local search game.
There is some helpful information at the link below describing how to get started...
Getting Listed in Google Local Business Center
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