Google Places Listing - Not Directly in City

that's a common problem actually so trust me you are not the only one. I work for a seo company and i probably manage 25-35 clients. Part of our seo obviously is to do local optimization for them. It does help if the actual office location is there. If its not then you need to make sure you start submitting to all the local directories as you can for that city.

You need to have him solicit reviews from customers who are willing to go to his places page and write reviews using your target "city" in their review

you will also need to get "geo targeted keyword anchor text links". This is actually a big one. I recently had a client out in NY who was complaining that one of his competitors had a places page showing in his area where he did not have an office.

When i looked into it further i found that one of his back links rested on a high PR page (a dot edu) that had the "city name" in the url. This page had a list of business owners that were not really associated with the area. hope that makes sense.

so the moral of the story is to get links that are geo targeted, and if possible get links from geo targeted pages like the one i just described.

Other things you can do:
add in geo pages to his site. Put the city you want into a new page on his site in the URL of the new page. So website.com/dallas or whatever. I would also put a local address in this page for something that is well known in the city like a monument or something. actually put the address in the bottom of the page with a phone number maybe even a google map.

For example, if it were an attorney you were trying to optimize you might use a local court house and put the address, directions, and ph number in this page. That way you're associating directly to the local area.

Make sense?

Other things would be to start a couple blogs and write about local news events in the tarted city and link back into his site. set up geo targeted categories on the blog, blog about those areas and then use geo anchor text to link back into this site.

Other than that its hard especially with restaurants because there are so many of them, and Google will only show a limited number.

Good luck

Trying to give all impressions the business is "there" is an important step as you well know. You've also seen how some people have taken measures to give those appearances. Some are better than others. I do not recommend to my clients that they use their 800#'s, but use the number that is associated with that city or get one. I don't recall how I know, I just know, but G prefers real numbers. There are also places where you can rent a mail box. Not the P.O. Box, but a mail box with a real world brick 'n mortar address. You may get a suite # or reg. # along with the address.

The people that use outside the area phone numbers, P.O. Boxes, 800#s and addresses not their own, may not be doing anything wrong; it's just that G prefers to have certain criteria in place before they will let them rank high in the 7 Pack or at all..

LastWarrior