The first improvement that Google has made to their local business center is the dashboard.   You are able to manage all of your local business listings, straight from your main LBC dashboard.  This is particularly useful if you are a internet marketing firm or a company with multiple locations.

The second improvement that Google has made for their LBC is the ability to monitor local listing performance, by incorporating analytics on each listing.  You can see the number of impressions and actions your listing has.  A action is defined by a key action on your listing like “Clicks for more info on Maps”, “Clicks for Driving Directions”, and “Clicks to your website”.

See what keywords and phrases searches are using to find your listing.

See where people are requesting driving directions from.

Like many other social profile sites like Linkedin, Flickr, and Facebook, Google gives your listing a percentage to let you know how complete your profile is.  This entices users to create as complete of a profile as possible, by adding not only basic company information but store hours, logos, videos, credit cards accepted, etc…

Along with all of these new features they also have other neat features like adding a coupon to your local business listing, bulk uploading multiple locations at once, and a tips/resource on how to create a complete listing.

With more emphasis being placed on localized search and the fact that Google is displaying 10 local business results for most local searches, it is extremely important to make sure your listing is 100% complete and verified with not only Google, but Yahoo and MSN.  The down side is that just because you have a complete listing, doesn’t necessarily mean you will show up #1 in that list of 10 local results.  Google places a heavy importance on your proximity to the center of the city that the user is searching.  Which means if you are trying to show up for “Raleigh Plumber” and your location is in a suburb, 20 miles outside of the city, it will have a difficult time showing up for Raleigh based searches.  Nevertheless it is still important to make sure that your complete is complete!