Places page not ranking AT ALL

Assuming you have done everything by the book, the only thing that comes to mind is that Google Places takes way more time to show results than organic SEO depending on the trade and locale. I've had a listing take around 6 weeks to show up in the first page.

Did you include your complete citation in the title tag of the website?

And so, there is other important things that may be delaying it....

Forgot to mention: If you do include the citation in yout title tag, do it EXACTLY the way it is in your GP listing. I mean word by word, case sensitive, punctuation sensitive...

Ok thats awesome, I'll give that a try. I'm guessing it's "title", "address" and "phone number" that are included, right? And it's just temporary right? Once the places page starts getting ranked again, I can swap back to the old title tag?

Sample of how it would look a title tag:

Tampa Plumbers, Plumbing & Drain Layers (keywords) | Clean Flush Tampa Plumbers, 123 Main St, Tampa, FL, 00000, (555) 555-5555 (citation)

So if you are already ranking real well for the website, keep the keywords and add the citation. Why would you want to remove it after? I don't. Although my cases are different, I usually work on the GP listing before attempting to work on the organic SEO of my client site.

If your client's site is in WP or whatever, also include the exact citation in the header to the right y'know... business info

Do you have a KML file and geo-sitemap?

Yep, KML and geo-sitemap been in for a while. I just recreated them and reuploaded and resubmitted to GWT, maybe that will help a little too....

Then I guess the only thing left to do is keep building citations I guess....! (and backlink them a little....)

Make sure your citations have business name address,phone and zip and all citations are identical. Also make sure its not a virtual address no p.o box or rented address and the phone number is from the phone company and not a cell phone or voip phone number.also try to get some reviews that very important in ranking but hide you ip if you do the reviews yourself after all your sweat it may take about less than 4 weeks to rank page one Google places don't update in real time

Link from Twitter, Facebook, forums and such to your Places Page URL.

Put your EXACT places citation at the bottom of each page on your site. Page, not footer. Sometimes Google won't pick it up there.

Gather all your URLS and get an pingler account, again use your EXACT citation as your title when you add a url inside your pingler account.

This should help you a lot.

There are some great suggestions on this thread. Keep 'em comin'!

Search your clients telephone number on Google search and see if there are any listings for that number from another business.

If there are, you have to overcome that with more citations and it's not easy.

Do the same for the top 3 listings that come up for GP and see how many citations come up for their numbers. Gives you a little idea what you may need to do to rank ahead of them.

One tip kinda off topic here but it's important for new clients:

New telephone numbers and addresses for businesses can really screw things up as far as GP is concerned.

Also, advise clients to search a telephone number before they take it. If it's a recently used number, will cause a headache for GP and I would advise them to get another one.
In the real world, doesn't matter. Online it's a killer.

Before you give a quote for a new client, search their phone number and address. Gives you an idea how difficult if will be to get ranked on GP if there are other businesses that once had them.