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Glad I could be of help. If you need any other guidance as you get into it, do just get in touch, I'd be happy to help. My contact details are on my SEOmoz profile

Hi Zach, Welcome back to the Local jungle! The most significant change in Local that has taken place in the last year is how significant a part the website plays in a business' overall ranking abilities. If you were doing Local SEO a few years back, the SERPs were filled with business ranking highly (in the old pack-style rankings) that didn't even have websites. This is rare now. Instead, you've got to have a great website, a clean Places record, review acquisition, citation acquisition, and in competitive verticals or populous regions, good links. Local business index listings are the first place to start with linkbuilding. I recommend that you read David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors Report from 2011 to catch up on some of the top local business indexes. Also, read Myles' Anderson Top 50 Citation Sources for the USA and UK at Search Engine Land. While not all citations sources are link sources, many of them are. Beyond this, what Matt Williamson is describing is pretty much what you'll be doing: building quality content that earns links. And, definitely take the time to memorize the current Google Places Quality Guidelines which have changed rather significantly over the past few years. Check back often because they keep changing them! I hope this gets you off to a good start. Good luck and have fun! Miriam