DO I need to SEO optomize/backlink my google places page too?

[sharkey]

I made a page on google places for my business but it's not showing up when searched for under the regular results, only if you search under google maps. DO I need to start running backlinks to that page to to get it to rank?

[bubbins1987]

I've got a first page (#1) Google places result for my mum's cattery and in my experience, you don't need backlinks but some simple SEO is a good idea.

Are other Google places listings showing up in ordinary listings?
If they are then you should check out what they've done.

Hope that helps

Thanks
Eleanor

[iAmNameLess]

Completing the listing, getting reviews, citations even on page optimization of your actual website will play a factor in places.

[sharkey]

I have a distinct and unique name and I'm the only one in the area with this type of business. Even if I search for "business name, my city" it doesn't come up unless I'm searching the maps.

there's no other places showing up when you search for it either.

[Jonny Quick]

Originally Posted by sharkey

I have a distinct and unique name and I'm the only one in the area with this type of business. Even if I search for "business name, my city" it doesn't come up unless I'm searching the maps.

there's no other places showing up when you search for it either.

Is this still the case? I was in the same situation last November, and my client's name was also very unique in that it was based in another language (not english). And Google treated it the same as domains from other countries, even when I searched for "client domain" "my city".

That was when my client had a PR0. Now we are at PR2, and all those tiny and insulting foreign sites do not even show up, because the search results are completely littered with all the backlinks I've created. I think in the very beginning it's about volume. Someone else's 3 really bad backlinks beat your 0 backlinks. At that time, I did "everything" willy-nilly. If I had to try to learn Local SEO for the first time with a first client all over again, I would work a very carefully sorted list of sites to register my client. Off the top of my head, that list would start out:

1) Google Places
2) Yelp
3) Merchant Circle
4) City Search
5) YP.com
etc....

I was lucky back then, as someone got me using SEO Spyglass, and I had the sense to run my client's competitor's URL's and find out where they were getting all their backlinks, and then duplicating their efforts and getting some for my client. It also gave me some insight into more advanced SEO, because some of the competitors are national-level franchises and are doing heavy-duty SEO in a fairly profitable niche, so I'm learning quite a bit by just researching what these very successful competitors are doing.

Unfortunately, SEO Spyglass has become almost useless due to their data being cut-off (somehow, and for some reason) by Yahoo. So their results are horrible. It might come back, but I doubt it, given that I can run URL's through Google and find more results than what SEO Spyglass is reporting. (You'd think they'd at least be able to duplicate what I can do manually, but no the software reports less than 25% of the backlinks that I can find with Google.

And MajesticSEO isn't all that great either, for several reasons. Try it, and you see. So, again, if I had to do it all over again, I'd be researching my client's competition's URL's, looking for backlinks and trying to get some insite into what they are doing, how, and why.

[HBurner]

Citations are the key for that. You must do as many as you can to get it higher in rankings.