Ranking a local business

Hey there!

So recently my dad has told me that he would like to be on top of Google for his fence/deck making business as it would get him some good targeted traffic and he asked me if I could get him there. The thing is, with the local searches the results at top are all mostly results (Near, *town*.. I think they are called google places.)

Soo.. I was wondering two things.

1) Is it very difficult to outrank such pages? Most of them barely have any BLP for the keywords... but they are in the places directory.

2) If thats too hard, If I were to get him listed in the same directory, does SEO work the same to get to the top of the Google Places directory. For example would I just need on site SEO and back-links to the page or would google comments make more of a difference here? Does google index these sites as much as others?

Thanks for the help, hope I was clear enough!

I am not going to give you G places advice because to be honest, I am not an expert. What I do know is that you can indeed outrank G places. There was a thread about it maybe a month ago where someone posted his results.

In addition I did a local site for a city I do not reside in and a field I do not participate in just as a case study. The result is I have 2 pages in the top 4 and both are above G places. The point is you can outrank G places if you are determined.

Getwhatchuwant said:

I am not going to give you G places advice because to be honest, I am not an expert. What I do know is that you can indeed outrank G places. There was a thread about it maybe a month ago where someone posted his results.

In addition I did a local site for a city I do not reside in and a field I do not participate in just as a case study. The result is I have 2 pages in the top 4 and both are above G places. The point is you can outrank G places if you are determined.

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Thanks! I couldn't find the thread you were speaking of but that info is nice to know. Do you know if the G places has an advantage to an average site, or does it just have the benefit of having the business's number right beside it?