You may have noticed something odd lately when searching for something within a place e.g. Nottingham Accountants. Before you would get a map at the top of your results, accompanied by 7 or 8 results, followed by your organic results. What you now get is something different.
Google have realised that the organic and map results had started to compete against each other, dividing web designers into deciding whether to optimise for maps or not. So now what they have done is remove the map results, order the results organically, and feature these organic results on a map.
What this means is that businesses will be rewarded for their SEO efforts and ranked accordingly. No longer will businesses be able to jump to the top of the results simply for having a central post code.