You need a website. Yes, your own website on your own hosted domain. Google now creates blended local listings in their results pages that include information from both a business' Place Page and its website. No website, no blended listing.

You need to optimize your website for local search. Your website's optimization now plays a huge part in ranking well for local searches. It needs to send the right signals to the Search Engines using sufficient, unique, key-word-rich crawlable content and metadata.

Your website  needs "authority", most of which can be gained through links from other authoritative websites. In the simplest terms, you need good links pointing to your pages. If you don't know what good links are, it's time to find out.

You need to claim and update your Google Place Page. Don't know what this is? Go here now!

You need to clean up your NAP. You need to make sure your business name, address and phone number (NAP) are consistent across the web. If the search engines see varying information, it can suppress your rankings, despite everything else you might be doing right.

You need a review and reputation management strategy. People are probably talking about your business on the web, whether you are aware of it or not. You need to monitor and become part of these conversations.

Consumers are looking online for opinions about local businesses before they make purchasing decisions. If they are not finding plenty of good opinions about your business, they may not consider it. So, you need to make sure that happy customers are spreading the word about your enterprise online.

Once you get these basics right, then you can worry about working to improve some of the other factors in the survey.
Check out Optimized! for more articles by Mary Bowling