Google has taken another swing at the Yellow Pages this week by placing their local map in a more prominent area and adding “Google Places” into the organic results and adding a new PPC standalone option called “Boost” that has already rolled out in San Francisco, Houston, and Chicago.

These “Boost” ads will appear n the sponsored area of Google and Google Maps and could include additional information about the local business such as reviews, photos, phone number, average star rating and more.

Google hopes that these new changes will encourage more local brick and mortar businesses to list their products and services in their search engine while also encouraging local shoppers to support their local business establishments.

In the last portion of Google’s announcement about Google Boost makes mention that:

“Placement in the sponsored links section of the page will, as always, depend on factors such as your ad’s relevance and quality”

I suspect that some “other” factors that they did not mention would also include:

• The quality of your landing page, making sure that the copy is relevant and has a high CTR
• The quality of your Google Places page, making sure that you chosen the correct keywords
• The quality of your images and videos on both your landing page and Places page also making sure that you have tagged them correctly

Therefore I feel having a strong foundation in PPC/SEO and how it relates to local search will still be critical in Google’s new feature.

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