Local SEO - Still relatively straight forward?

I ask because I've very much put SEO on the backburner since it became an advanced guessing game, my question is to those that do mainly White/Grey hat SEO for local businesses and whether they have noticed it is more of a struggle to rank keywords like "Best Dentist in Sydney" since the updates?

I would imagine this area is largely unaffected as competition is by no means fierce BUT I could be wrong so interested in a few professionals opinions.

Thanks!

Ya lots of citations, and articles...

Google+ listings have definitely taken a bigger chunk of the first page of results so make sure you are doing whatever you can to promote that listing. Local SEO is a very different beast, and brings its own challenges. Google some local seo phrases and you'll find some good articles on the topic.

Interesting, iv entered the offline arena sometime ago but just recently iv finished building our business website. does anynoe have any help with Google local listing?