Hi Jake

No, you can’t buy one of the top 7 spots on Google Places so I would treat these claims with a healthy degree of scepticism.

In the vast majority of cases you don’t have to be an SEO expert or pay for expensive SEO services to get a top 7 listing on Google Places. As you’ve demonstrated, just following the simple steps set out in this post will do the trick! The only exceptions to this are if you are in a highly competitive niche or if you are trying to get your business to rank for multiple geographical areas when more sophisticated tactics may be called for.

Claiming your Google Places listing is a straightforward process and completely free. All you have to do is click on the link at the top of the Google Places page where it says Edit This Place – Business Owner? and enter your details. Google will then send a postcard to the business address with a PIN to verify your ownership. Once you have verified your ownership you can then edit and optimise your listing.

we have had a number of seo’s approach us offering to secure our google places listing for a fee and when talking to them it seems that they can buy one of the 7 spots on google places. is this the case and is this what is ment by claiming your listing. we have little knowlege about web optimisation. All of the other methods in your tips above have got us to 2nd on the places page with only a holding page for our website. thanks

1) Universal Business Listings (UBL) is not a very good service. Honestly speaking – it stinks. I have used it on a few occasions but their support is not good and the work is rather slow. The whole process is much lengthier than is needed. For reverse engineering of the competitors activities the best is the Whitespark Local Citation Finder tool (they have a free version).

2) Getting links to the Google Places listing is proven not to work. Getting links to the listings on third-party directories could work as much as indexing them and associating them faster with the listing goes. I’d not suggest more than a few links to each of the directory listings.

3) Geo-tagged photos on Flickr and Panoramio work great, but also adding photos on sites like Citysearch and Yahoo have proven to be of great help. Overall, completing 100% the listings on ALL business directories works great (especially on such directories that measure completeness – Manta can be a good example).

4) I’m not quite sure why one should first get all the work done and then claim their listing. You mention in the beginning of the article that not claiming a listing is a mistake, right? Then I seem to be missing the point here.

Overall, the article is covering the most important points of Google Places optimization. Good job!

Cheers,
Nyagoslav
OptiLocal

Dan
The whole distance thing is a bit of a problem with Google Places, which seems to have a rather simplistic definition of how local businesses operate and is one reason why some resort to multiple listings using fictitious addresses.

If you operate out of a local office with a physical address you can specify this in your listing as a service location. Instead of specifying a radius of operation from your main business address you can state the specific areas you operate in. As Ruud and Wayne have pointed out, having separate landing pages and business addresses and local phone numbers that are listed in all the directories will help – prevalence trumps distance in the Google Places algorithm.

Wayne – you are quite right, painters and decorators are probably further behind the curve than many local businesses but there are a lot of them and I have found similar patterns for many other business categories, particularly trades like plumbers, electricians etc. which tend to be one man (or woman!) bands. It goes without saying that if you are operating in one of these business categories you can get a significant edge on the competition if you are one of the few to claim your listing.

In response to reply to David, I would say that the UK is a little behind the US with regards to claimig – but it depends on the industry….some are far more savvy than others. In my experienc P and Ds dont really know much about the internet never mind that they need to claim their Places listing (no offence to the decorators!)

For Dan,

I agree with Ruud, get some more landing pages built. Depending on the competiveness of your industry will determine how much work you need to put in. Local telephone numbers and seperate businesses adresses are good as well.

Wayne

Of the top of my head:

– for physical products you can consider Google Local Shopping
– for regional targeting, consider regional tags
– get a second telephone line with the area code of the other region you’re active in,
– get a PO Box address in the other location and list it as one of your locations, both on your website and in directories
– build landing pages specific to each location you work for

If someone else has a good idea to add, I’m all ears!

I have seen various statistics bandied around but the 90% figure is based on my own research. For example, I recently carried out an optimisation project for a client and manually checked all the Google Places listings for painters and decorators in his local area. 90% of the listings had not been claimed. This is a pattern I have seen across a number of business categories. It may be that the US is further ahead of the curve than the UK and certainly we are seeing a a trend here with more businesses coming forward to claim their listings so my expectation is that this figure will steadily fall but whichever you look at it, that’s still an awful lot of unclaimed listings.

I am curious to know the source of the estimate of 90% unclaimed businesses …? In the US we can extrapolate from Marissa Mayer’s SxSW talk this year that there are 3MM claimed Place Pages in the US…estimates range anywhere from 14MM US Businesses to 20MM…meaning the # of claimed pages is actually closer to 20-30%.

If you have an actual stat I would love to know where it came from since I frequently get asked that question.

Thanks!
David