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Hi Jayt, Very good question! Step one is to explain to the client that inclusion in Google's local results is based on the business having: A physical address in the target city (not a virtual office, p.o. box or shared address) A local area code phone number in the city of address (not a toll free number, call tracking number or shared number) In-person transactions with customers, face-to-face, either at the company's offices (like a lawyer or doctor) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber or carpet cleaner). From your description, your client's business is virtual (serving customers over the phone and online) and therefor, is not eligible for local inclusion. Share the Google Places Quality Guidelines with the client so that can see Google's own explanation of their policies: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 Because of your client's virtual, national business model, building visibility on a local level via Local SEO is out. Rather, your client will need to rely on organic SEO in an effort of gaining secondary organic visibility for service+ geography terms (not primary organic visibility via the local packs of results). Realistically speaking, unless the client is in a non-competitive market, this will be an uphill battle, because it is Google's current preference to show mostly true local results for queries they believe have a local intent. If Google already has plenty of businesses that meet the above 3 criteria, your client will need some incredible SEO work to convince Google to show them organically for queries relating to geographic regions where they have no physical presence. I hate to sound negative, and I'm not saying this goal is impossible, but the client needs to be given the education that will help him understand how and why Google operates the way they do in relation to local data so that the client can make the smartest investment of time, money and effort. Organic SEO may be able to take the client part of the way, but don't forget about PPC. That may have to be a large part of the mix for any company seeking this type of national dominance. Hope this helps!

You have covered the most important items. 1. If possible, keep the same URL structure. If that is not possible, be certain all the URLs are properly redirected (301) to the equivalent pages on the new site. 2. Ensure the new site's navigation is solid. Perform a crawl of the old and new site, or generate a sitemap for both sites. Compare the URLs and investigate any discrepancies. 3. You should investigate all the normal SEO factors to ensure they are in tact between sites. Header tags, meta descriptions, meta tags such as index and follow, robots.txt, alt tags, etc. should all be inspected. 4. You should check to ensure the new site uses valid HTML/CSS. While not directly SEO related, invalid code often causes issues where your site does not appear properly in various browser versions. Your pages can easily be checked with the W3C validation tool. 5. Minimize flash on the new site or, if you do use flash, ensure you have the proper HTML support. You can disable flash on your browser then view your site to verify. 6. You should check your site security after moving to the new CMS. 7. Ensure your daily backups are created on an automated process. TEST IT! Perform a site restore to a test site after your first day of being live. 8. Ensure you have a "friendly" 404 page. Offer a search box and your normal site's navigation so users are more likely to stay on your site. 9. Check your site's page load speed with PageSpeed or YSlow. 10. Make sure your client has a solid process in place to handle maintenance. A current client had an issue where after his software was originally installed he never updated. His site was hit by malware as a direct result. A plan should be established as to how software updates will occur.