I spend a lot of time on here, here being “t`internet tubes” i tend to take notice of local stuff. If you have not seen it yet Google maps offers a local search feature where you can view everything close to what you are searching for.

Search for something random for whatever city/town you want to have a look at as normal in Google.

Now click on maps (top of your browser) apologies if you are viewing this via your phone, i don`t know how it looks in that format.

Now when you are in Google maps.. just to the right of the search box you should see “Whats around here?”

Clicking that button should bring up all the popular destinations for what you just searched for.

Do you see that little orange fella? get closer in by clicking on that + symbol (probably twice) will bring up a load of orange dots all over that map.

Those dots have been plotted by yocals that have either listed their site within Google Maps or have ben plotted via “street view” references.

Now if you are going to ask “what the hell does all this mean?”

My answer is 2 fold

Firstly not only have you just glanced at everything nearby but now you may well have an amazing array of potential new local ink prospects.

What advantage does this have?

Well from a personal point of view if you are not exhausting local links for citation purposes you are firstly overlooking potential opportunities, but you may well be missing an opportunity to gain or share a link of real relevance within the exact same space that you are sharing online. For example in the UK, there is seemingly a growing market within Manchester for SEO Services and those that are taking a local building opportunity will grow a competitive advantage.

This is of course my own opinion, but those Manchester SEO`s and you in your local space should take a look a little closer to home.

Without going into too much detail i know who my local competitors are and so should you beyond your normal web search. Even for me this Maps method threw up some suprises.

I did try to find a mashup that would extract links without success and the closest i came was when Aaron Wall mentioned a nice little bookmarklet “Simple Google Results” (onlinesales.co.uk).

First and foremost that simple little script is awseome in its simplicity, but alas in this instance trying to grab URL`s from Google Maps it does not serve the purpose. Shame really, but if any of you guys are reading this i would be your first customer if you were ever to develop a paid or unpaid version of extracting links from these results.

I have probably not given the “What`s Around Here?” enough justice.

So if you have landed on a local map from your random search, you can actually dive a little deeper.

You can do this by category

There is no apparent navigation to do this, but if you did click on “Whats Around Here?” you should notice that the search box contains an *

This * is your starting point to search by category

Try a search for *travel agents

This is a popular category so it should throw up all those travel agents in that local search.

This local link building opportunity is just a small facet of what makes up any profile, but i for one will always look here first before venturing elsewhere.

There is a whole lot more to local search than this brief post and is by no means a resource, it is simply highlighting something that you may have overlooked along the way.

10 likely elements offers the next step in local search and you will gain small and big wins via that site.