• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 5, 2012

Rio SEO, a Covario company, has acquired Top Local Search to support local search engine optimization for retailers, manufacturers and service businesses with multiple locations, as well as dealerships and franchise owners.

Spun out from San Diego-based Covario in April, the acquisition gives the software business unit five hyper-local SEO software offerings to its growing suite of search, social media and content marketing automation tools. For instance, custom store-by-store information becomes available to consumers in an area searching for individual store hours, location directions, specific products or services, local promotions, gift cards, and more.

Top Local Search founder Bill Connard, along with customer support manager Penny Phaneuf will join the Rio SEO team.

Russ Mann, chief executive of Rio SEO, has begun to reach deeper into multichannel strategies to service the customers in stores, catalogs or online. The more sophisticated companies have learned how to track and monitor interaction between channels. It now takes mobile, desktop, social and more to support a company.

Google has put a heavy emphasis on local search. Last week, the engine began integrating local recommendations into its social platform Google+.

Local SEO Guide founder Andrew Shotland points to research from Bizible that statistically determines ranking factors for local search results based on content. The top local ranking factors for pages not in the integrated results could mean companies that have five or more Google reviews could move up in the rankings by 1.47 places. Search category or a synonym in review content could mean moving up 0.97 places in the rankings, and at least one photo might generate a 0.66 improvement in ranking.

Nearly complete, the back-end integration will give clients a SEO module to help generate Web traffic for individual stores and businesses, as well as an automation tool for optimizing Web pages to deliver more local search traffic and analytics.