Usually it's the website that holds a listing back. Check out this: Local Search Ranking Factors | Local SEO Best Practices for Ranking in Google +Local and see where you're lacking. The list looks intimidating, but many of those things are quite easy to implement and they make a huge difference.

Don't forget to build citations matching the NAP of the listing as well, make sure you put a lot of concentration on the organic part of your website as well since that helps G+ rankings.

What type of business?

Did you check off that the business visits clients to their location? Or is this the type of business where clients come to the business?

I once did a place for a mortgage broker: they go to some clients, some clients come to their office (to apply and to close). When the place was set to show that the broker and his people were willing to travel 20 miles to meet with a client, their place page was hard to find (don't remember the page but definitely not in the top 5).

I changed the page to reflect that people come to the office to do business with them. 3 days later, they were #1.

A Google Plus Page is like a Facebook business page. No verification required (but option is given to all). You can create posts / updates, add unlimited images and videos, and you have an "About" tab that can be filled with stuff.

A Local Listing is a different animal; these must be verified and there is a set amount of info that can be added to them. Very little of the info added to the backend is visible to the public, too. For example, videos have been disabled for some time (1 year?)

Now some businesses have the official go ahead from Google to MERGE the two. Merging the two means that your new local listing would have more than the default "About" and "images" tabs, but would also have "posts" and ... "videos" (I can't recall right now).

To get a merged listing, Google says you need to be a business that services customers at the business location (no service area, no hidden address) and you must verify both the Business Page and the Local Listing. This merging then happens automatically.

Now others have said they were successful in merging pages for other types of businesses, so I don't know what gives with that, but there you have it.

Hi Chantal,

The "transfer" you're referring to was a change that took place last year and that change was largely cosmetic. Yes, the old Google Places pages were changed to a Google Plus Local listing and their appearance changed to match that of other Google Plus profiles, both personal and business, but editing information for those listings still takes place in the old Google Places dashboards.

The merging of the business pages and local pages that I'm referring to is officially only available to certain companies and must be manually initiated. Once that's done, editing of business information happens via the Google Plus system and not the old Google Places dashboard.

So we're talking about different things.

As of today, there are still the 4 types of pages you can have:

1) Google Plus PERSONAL profiles
2) Google Plus BUSINESS pages
3) Google Plus Local Listings (non-merged - available to all)
4) Google Plus Local Listings (merged - limited availability, still being tested)

#4 is almost identical to #3, except in the case of #4, both 2 and 3 become one. They look like #3 but with a few extra functions as I mentioned above.

Citations citations and citations have ALWAYS worked well for me. It does take time but make sure you are setting it up correctly.

A site gets ranked well with citations, videos, tagged images and a good quality website.

Most people don't take the time to do a 10 minute job cause they dont know how effective photobucket and similar sites are.