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According to the latest study conducted by BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, a whopping 97% of consumers are going online to search for products and services in their areas. For local businesses, these types of searches are the most important because they often result in a quick conversion, either with phone call or a visit to their physical store.

So how do local searches work in Google?

Google remains the top “go-to” search portal where consumers turn to find local businesses. To do a local search in Google, the consumer either adds a specific location to their search parameter (New York City, say), or Google will do it for her by returning search results based on her GPS coordinates. Search Engine Watch’s Linkdex recently report that 69% of the time, search results are significantly affected by the searcher’s geolocation, so if your business hasn’t claimed its Google+ page then you might be at a disadvantage.

Google Places is now Google+ Local

If you’ve been trying to make your site more visible through SEO and online marketing tactics for a while, you may remember listing your  business in what was used to be called Google Places. In early 2012, Google Places was replaced by Google+ Local, along with the conversion of some 80 million Google Places page to Google+ Local pages. With this change, what use to be a static “Place” page morphed to a more dynamic Google+ Local page, integrating more seamlessly with other Google products.

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