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In recent changes to Google’s way of life, we have seen a difference in local results for US/Canada and UK google local search.

The ‘7pack’ as it is known (the local map with ~7 businesses listed at the beginning of search results – Local Search) was easy, and still is.
What you need to keep in mind now, and inevitably forever, is that should you choose to be adding a SEO or webdesign business to local search, you will know longer see it when searching for example: San Francisco SEO Service will only show “natural results”. By simply changing the search to SEO Service in San Francisco it will now show the ‘7pack’.

Here is the response from Google employee Joel H

Hi Folks -
Earlier thread, Brian (BB- baseonballs) noted that this may be related to a known issue regarding the display of local search results on google.com. After further investigation, they are slightly different, and I’ll explain our intent.
Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham]. I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.
I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today. ? [source]

So should you be looking at optimizing for these businesses (or your own), keep this in mind