If I have a site that has good seo, is there high changes it will show up on top of google places? It seems a bit unfair that a site that has a "google place" will automatically appear higher than a site with good seo. Or does this not typically happen?
A question I was wondering too. I think Google Place wins unless the until the Good Seo site does not have a high PR i.e above 6.
There has to be a Google Places account/page for it to show up in the Google local rankings. You will notice that the local search rankings are separate from the regular/organic listings, so if you have good SEO you can show up at the top of the organic listings, but without a Google places page you will not show up at the top of the local listings.
good question. good seo helps a lot with google places, however like revium mentioned you have to have a google places account to gain from the good seo for your local google rankings. also make sure to fully fill the profile and get some reviews and you should be good to go with ranking high in google local results too.
It totally depends on the keyword and competition AND which of the 2 local algos Google gives you for that search term. With one algo you can rank in Places AND in organic. I even have clients ranking #1 for both. So 2 #1 rankings on the same page. With the other algo, what we call the blended algo, your site and Place page are merged together into a single listing. With that algo though sometimes there are 2 or 3 pure organic listings ABOVE the Places listings. But if you rank 3 or 4 in organic and don't have a Place page you'll def show up down the page below the blended results.