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+1 to the above. It was a good model when it launched, but now just too cluttered to be of any real significance.

Definitely do not h2 tags aroudn your entire navigation. it doesn't semantically make any sense, which can only lead to long term SEO problems (if it isn't a problema lready). Use CSS styled navigation through an unordered list HTML element. Ensure the keywords are relevent and you set the title attribute of your links appropriately. If one linke has more importance than the others, maybe try making it bold with a html tag. This might emphasise it's SEO importance.

I think that its an issue. Although the link juice passed is not that high, it makes complete sense to get the images on the same server as the website. As an immediate step, you can add a nofollow tag to the links just to make sure that no link juice is passed.

Depending on the type of listing, well optimised Places listings could help significantly, particularly if you can get your client to work with their clients to post reviews on the listings. In almost all cases where we've actively engaged the client, more reviews and high rated reviews helps us easily outrank competitors - a single review where there was none before often gets our Places listing on the first page of serps for some of our target keywords.