So you trying to rank locally on Google in top3? You can forget about it.
One big trend we noticed after all this Google Updates that started an year ago, including recent Penguin 2.1 is that a lot of local results are now a complete garbage. If you looking to find anything local, you might as well skip Google and go straight to YELP or Yellowpages, because that’s what you’ll see anyways if you search for any local service on Google.
It actually looks like YELP and Yellowpages just bought top spots, so no matter what local keyword you type in you’ll see YELP or Yellowpages in top3 spots.

I personally think that it’ll be nice to browse a company’s website to look at pictures, prices etc. vs browsing YELP and Yellowpages all day, but obviously Google thinks different.

Let’s go ahead and perform few searches:
Google (Nothing but YELP Listings in top 10):

Bing:

Let’s pick few other keywords now:
locksmith los angeles – first 4 is YELP
plumber los angeles – #1 and #2 YELP and Yellowpages #3
hair salon santa monica – first 4 is YELP
hair salon los angeles – first 4 is YELP + 3 Yellowpages

Did you notice a trend here? When you search ANYTHING local 99% of the time top3-5 results will be YELP or Yellowpages. What happened to their update that was supposed to merge the sites with more then 1 result on the first page?

It looks like if you want to advertise locally, might as well forget about maps and just advertise on YELP and Yellowpages.