Here is how to do it. First check to see if your business is listed in Google Maps. Do a search for your business name and include your city name and state in the search query.

If your listing already exists, and you’ve not yet claimed it, the results will indicate that it is an “unverified listing”. It will stay “Business owner?”

Click on the link “Business owner?” and choose “Edit”.
The last step – verification. The fastest way is to let Google call you on your main business phone and provide the pin code that you can enter on your screen right away.
In case there are duplicate listings for your business – claim them all, but update only one of them that has most reviews.
Do not add extra info like descriptions, categories, etc. into the listings you are not going to use. Just strip them down to a basic listing with the same address and phone number as your main listing. Google has been slowly merging duplicates into one when the contact info is the same.
If you think this process if too overwhelming and you want to make sure that you get it done right – we are here to help. Contact us and we’ll setup your Google Places listing as well as other local listings.

2. Local Search is a Work in Progress
Local search has the potential to be a rather large market; North America Yellow Pages bring in 16 billion dollars per year, which is larger than the search ad market. Various businesses will tell you that is not a big deal, and other businesses will tell you that it is the best thing since sliced bread. Typically, whoever is funding the report determines the outcome. Local search is still somewhat underdeveloped.

http://GetListed.org – website shows what local listings look like in major search engines, and helps users submit their sites to local search engines.

There are four types of local searches:

Full Local Search – this is when our potential customer types is a location and their search topic. For example – “West Bloomfield dentist”, “Detroit steak house”, “Encino dry cleaners”, and so on.

Partial Local Search – when our potential customers just type in their search term without an identifier.We’ll use previous examples to demonstrate – “dentist”, “steak house”, “dry cleaners”, and so on. The search engine is smart and knows where you live by the IP address of your computer. IP address or Internet Protocol address is a numerical label that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network. So if my customers are in West Bloomfield, MI and they type “dentist”, the search engine assumes that they are looking for “West Bloomfield dentist”.

Destination Based Search – this kind search our potential customers use when they are going someplace. For instance if they are planing on traveling to Traverse City, Michigan ( a popular vacation destination for Michiganders) and they may want to search for “Traverse City hotels”. This type of search while not important for local searches is critical for travelers and vacationers.

Pay-Per-Click Local Search – pay-per-click advertising can also be used locally. Pay-per-click ads called Adwords by Google search engine can be specified to individual zip codes and other specific locations within a local area. If this is done, this kind of ads will only show up when our potential customers are searching that specific area.

Fortunately for us – small business owners there are companies like EZLocalFind.com that take good care of us by setting us properly with search engines and making sure that our customers can find us on the first page of Google and other search engines.