The long-awaited update of the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey was released a few weeks ago and things have changed pretty drastically since the last survey 12 months ago! Unless you've had your head buried in the sand, you're well aware of the algorithm shifts that occurred in October of 2010 and the survey will confirm many of your gut feelings and observations, while giving you some new factors to consider when doing Local SEO.

In this year's survey 34 expert Local Search practitioners weighed in with their opinions on 79 possible ranking factors. That's a bellyful of information to try to digest. My advice is not to worry about anything that isn't in the top 10, less you're already rocking on all of those factors. Until you get those big ones right, the rest won't move the needle much, if at all, on the ranking dial. Let's take a look at the survey and see what should be on your to-do list for the websites of local businesses.

The top overall factors that are believed to help you rank well in both the new style blended listings and the standard Maps listings are:

• Having a physical address on your Place page that is within the city being searched. Location, location, location!
• A manually owner-verified Place page. (Not a Place page verified via a bulk upload.)
• The overall volume of citations from traditional data providers, such as the Internet Yellow pages and data aggregators, like Localeze.
• Having a crawlable address on your website that matches the address on your Place page.
• The overall authority of your website, which is reflected in true (not toolbar) PageRank.
• The quality of the inbound links to your website.
• Having a crawlable phone number on your website that matches the phone number on your Place page.
• Using a local phone number, with area code, on your Place page.
• Having the City and State in the page title of the website URL you publish on your Place page.

As you can see, what you do on your Place page and on your website is critical to ranking. Quality links pointing to your website and quality citations referring to your business are vital, as well. Matching the information on your Place page and on your website ties it all together.

The top things that are thought to harm your rankings are:

• Having multiple phone numbers published for your business across the web. This includes using call tracking numbers unless the same tracking number is used everywhere across the web.
• Having more than one Place page with the same phone number.
• Having different addresses on your Place page and on the website URL it points to.
• Having different phone numbers on your Place page and on the website URL it points to.
• Not having a crawlable address on your website.
• Instructing Google not to display your address on your Place page.
• Having more than one Place page with the same or very similar business names.
• Not publishing a crawlable local phone number with the area code on your website.
• Stuffing the category fields on your Place page with multiple categories.
• Using the wrong types of terms in the custom categories on your Place page. (Location, brand, product, etc.)

Negative factors are heavily weighted towards what I call data confusion. That is, when Google is confused about what your true business name, physical address and local phone number are, your Local Search rankings can be severely suppressed, despite any other things you may be doing right.

Here's a good example of data confusion caused by the business moving several times and not updating all of their data across the web. None of these Place pages ranks very well because Google is unsure of their accuracy.

No one knows for sure exactly which factors enter into the Google algorithms and how they are weighted. This is simply the combined opinions of 34 people. But it's the best we have to go on as far as ranking factors for Local SEO for another 12 months, so start putting it to work for you as soon as you can.