When you insert a keyword, sometimes you must have seen the description of places in google result. Count them. They are in 7. Only seven website address is listed in that google map result. To get your site in Magic 7, at first you have to register your site in Goolge map
First off, it is not always 7. You can have a 1,3,4 (rare),5,7 depending on the area and industry. Yes, the first step is obviously creating/verifying a GP listing. We focus our company solely on create/optimize/maintaining Google places listings for our clients. There is a lot to it but the basics are: 1. Have a legit location and some local phone number (if you want staying power) 2. Get content enough to complete every section of what is asked for in a listing 3. Correctly target your citations on other sites (similar to backlinks but for local seo) 4. Have a continuous stream of new or fresh content that is scraped throughout the internet and attached to your listing If you have/or are the one doing the organic seo for you or your client this adds a nice boost to all efforts and can work even if you don't have a website. pm if you want more info.
There has been a bit of talk about address being closest to center of town/city better for ranking in local. whats your view on this topic? thanks CC
CaboChris, It still does unfortunately give an edge from what I have seen. I am hoping that the city-centric stuff will go away since not every business is downtown but it has to do with the geo-tagging kml setup that is going on right now. I believe over time that this will be corrected in the algorythms
There are only 3 businesses of our kind in Google places in our area. Ours just happens to have the lowest starting letter - so we rank first in searches. All good until someone opens a business with a starting letter lower than ours ...
Others call this a "7 Pack" including people like Bruce Clay - long time SEOs. Its just first 7 listings from the google map on first page of google before natural listings.