Google map results (“local business results”) are recently showing even more prominently than ever amongst the regular search results.

For a long time, the so called “seven pack” was another valued ‘property’ of SEO. At least if you had some local business: it doesn’t work for non-locational things such as most web businesses that are all SEO-crazy.

When Google recognizes a search as being local, it would display a small map on the top along with seven results in summary form. With the latest changes to the main search results page (think of live search, instant previews, real time results etc.) this has now become even more so: the “local business results” now are at least as big as the regular results, and come with rich data such as images and ratings. This obviously makes them more attractive than ever.

I like it, because for my dancing club we do have such a prominent result. :-)