F@#$! G00gle Places Help!

My offline business was sitting at #1 for the last 6 months for various keywords. I wake up this morning to see google places has taken it over and I am now 2-3 in there! How the hell do I get first in places? Do I need a bunch of reviews? Is there a way to get on top of places like you sometimes see? I seen a thread that suggested high PR contextual links for this. Please help!

Do some SEO for your Google places page Just like you would for a youtube video, just build links to it and it will soon climb back. Also a few reviews would not hurt

It has to do with alot of things. First thing I would do is look at the other listings that are there. Look at what they are doing, Do what they do and do more then they do. If you are falling then some things you did are no longer there. Check all your backlinks to see if they are still in place and so on. If you still need help just pm me.

bigballin6161 said:

My offline business was sitting at #1 for the last 6 months for various keywords. I wake up this morning to see google places has taken it over and I am now 2-3 in there! How the hell do I get first in places? Do I need a bunch of reviews? Is there a way to get on top of places like you sometimes see? I seen a thread that suggested high PR contextual links for this. Please help!

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It sounds like your KW is now showing what is called a blended listing. A blended listing is different in the sense that it has many factors in play over a traditional pure places listing. With a blended listing, most believe that the organic factors have more weight than the traditional places factors. It looks like you already have a good contribution from the organic ranking element of the blended (because you were ranking #1 before). It sounds like you should focus on optimization of your places listing.

To improve your local listing:

1. Optimize your places page itself (claim it, add geo tagged photos and vids, etc, make sure you get your profile 100% complete)
2. Build citations (basically your name, address, & phone, in the same format as places uses). Try to make your citations as complete as possible (you will even get some backlinks out of doing this too). There are lists for this all over the place but here are a few to get you started:

• yelp
• bestoftheweb
• hotfrog
• yahoo local
• bing local
• merchantcircle
• superpages
• insiderpages
• expressupdateusa

3. Build links to your places page and those citations that you built.
4. Use microformating on your website with your address in footer or header
5. Make a KML sitemap and submit to Google (in not going to explain this but you basically make a KML file, and the a geo-sitemap.xml that points to it, you submit the geo-sitemap.xml in WMT)

cybersage: Very good information, and specific. Glad to see people giving out good information! GP is sometimes difficult, but with hard work and dedication... you'll get there.

when you build your citations keep a list of the urls in a notepad file then bookmark the citations and create an rss feed of the bookmark urls and submit to a few rss aggregators. this will help you get them indexed a bit quicker

So when I build backlinks to my places page do I just build them normally like I do for the other pages of my website? Or is there anything I should do different? Also wouldnt a bunch of backlinks going to my places page look kinda suspect?

Having a local phone number (with your local area code) on your home page helps with Google Places. It is one of the ways Google favors local businesses for local searches.

It's all about proximity, not reviews or citations.