Ranking in Google Search Places

Hello all,

Does SEOing my local business Google+ page, or building links to it, have any direct effect on my placement order in the Places search results?

The reason I ask is, I SPECIFICALLY sell health insurance in my town, and doing a search for "health insurance <nameoftown>" I come up second, behind a state farm agent that doesn't even sell or write health insurance of any kind.

What odd is I actually have "(name) - Health Insurance Agent" as my listing, whereas the guy in position # 1 just has "(name) - state farm agent" as his listing. I also have a 5-star review and he has no reviews of any kind. I'm the only person or business specializing in health insurance in my town since AHA made most people abandon underage insurance for medd supps and P&C.

So how TF is he ahead of me? I don't get it. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks

I think citations help alot

Build Local Citations at all major citation websites including Yelp, Foursquare etc. and keep the citation details (name, address, phone number etc.) same everywhere. That should help.

Local citations + Reviews = Local SEO success

Okay...This is really weird. I started manually adding my business information to nearly every popular local citation service I could find.... (YP, Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) using the exact same information on all of them (name, phone, website, address, profile pic, etc.) and now I'm not even on the google local search for "health insurance (city name)".

Is this normal?

wilnadon said:

Okay...This is really weird. I started manually adding my business information to nearly every popular local citation service I could find.... (YP, Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) using the exact same information on all of them (name, phone, website, address, profile pic, etc.) and now I'm not even on the google local search for "health insurance (city name)".

Is this normal?

Click to expand...

You should wait until google rank you ( you must see a drop on your results but it will rank soon "

Dude, you originally posted this on Sunday, give it some time.

Edit: Never mind, sorry I read that wrong. You mean you completely were taking off since doing that, hmm ya I haven't seen that. But maybe they're moving you around, hopefully it pops back in higher.

wilnadon said:

Okay...This is really weird. I started manually adding my business information to nearly every popular local citation service I could find.... (YP, Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) using the exact same information on all of them (name, phone, website, address, profile pic, etc.) and now I'm not even on the google local search for "health insurance (city name)".

Is this normal?

Click to expand...

"You should wait until google rank you ( you must see a drop on your results but it will rank soon ""

I was ranked. If you'll look in my original post, I was # 2 in the local "google places(?)" results. Now, after adding a bunch of exact-match local citations, I'm nowhere to be found.

Has this happened to anyone else?

"Dude, you originally posted this on Sunday, give it some time. "

I've been in the local listing for over a year.

ibmethatswhoib said:

Edit: Never mind, sorry I read that wrong. You mean you completely were taking off since doing that, hmm ya I haven't seen that. But maybe they're moving you around, hopefully it pops back in higher.

Click to expand...

Yeah it's weird. I hope you're right. I know it's normal for organic results to dance around a bit before settling down but I've never seen it happen to local business listings and was wondering if anyone else had seen it. If I pop back up I'll make sure to update the thread with where I ended up.

Does Statefarm website outranks your website in organic results for health insurance <nameoftown>?