Google Places: claiming your local listing and winning the 7-pack

Until last month, a search such as "dentist Phoenix" showed a block of seven map listings, the 7-pack, with the regular ten blue links below. On October 27 Google rolled out Place Search. For local queries, the map now floats on the right, and the Place results are blended into the main results with the business's Place Page and website shown together. Each result also shows review counts and snippets pulled from across the web.

Two practical consequences. First, the Place Page and your own website are now ranked together, so the quality of your site matters more for local visibility than it did. Second, more of the page is given to local results, which means a business that is not in Places is simply less visible than it was a month ago. The 7-pack still appears for many queries and on Google Maps itself, so the term is still useful.

Go to google.com/places and sign in with a Google account the business controls, not an employee's personal account. Search for your business first. Google has probably already built an unclaimed listing from directory data, and claiming it is better than creating a duplicate.

Verification happens by postcard to your business address or by an automated phone call to the listed number. The postcard takes one to two weeks. Choose the phone option if your main line is answered by a person or a simple voicemail; it fails on phone trees. If the listing was created by someone else and already shows as claimed, use the Report a Problem link on the Place Page and be prepared to prove ownership.

Google ranks complete listings above thin ones. Fill all of this:

1. Business name. Exactly as it appears on your sign and your invoices. Adding a city or a keyword to the name violates the guidelines and gets listings suspended.
2. Address. The real street address. Suite numbers in the second line.
3. Phone. A local number, not an 800 number, as the primary. Tracking numbers cause the citation problems described below, so avoid them here.
4. Categories. You get five. The first should be one of Google's own suggested categories. Use the others for the specific services people search for, such as "Emergency Plumber" or "Invisalign Dentist".
5. Description. Up to 200 characters. What you do, who you do it for, where.
6. Hours, payment types, photos and video. Upload ten photos, the maximum. Exterior, interior, staff, work. Link a short YouTube video if you have one.
7. Service area. If you travel to customers, set a radius or a list of cities and decide whether to hide your address.

A listing that is 100 percent complete, with ten photos and all five categories, outranks an identical business at 60 percent almost every time we have measured it.

A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website, with or without a link. Google uses citations to confirm the business is real and located where you say it is. The number and consistency of your citations is the main ranking factor you can control after the listing itself.

Start with the data suppliers that feed everyone else: Localeze, infoUSA and Acxiom. Then the major directories and review sites.

Consistency matters more than volume. If your listing says "123 Main St., Suite 4" on Google, "123 Main Street #4" on Yelp and an old address on Superpages, Google sees three businesses and gives you credit for none of them. Pick one exact format for name, address and phone and use it everywhere, including the footer of your own website. Then spend a few hours searching your phone number in quotes to find the old and wrong listings, and fix them one by one.

Review count and star rating now appear directly in search results, and the number of reviews is a ranking signal. Google pulls reviews from its own Maps users and from third-party sites, so Yelp and Citysearch reviews count toward the number shown.

Ask for reviews in person, at the moment a customer is happiest, and follow up with a short email containing a direct link to your Place Page. Aim for two to four new reviews a month. Do not ask staff or family to write them, do not offer payment, and do not set up a computer in your shop for customers to review from, because a batch of reviews from one IP address is a known filter trigger on Yelp and a risk on Google. Respond to negative reviews through the Business Owner response feature, briefly and without arguing.

Because Place Search blends the website with the Place Page, make sure your site states your city and state in the page titles, has your exact name, address and phone in text on every page, and includes a Contact page with an embedded Google Map. Register the site in Google Webmaster Tools and submit a sitemap. If your website is a single Flash movie or a one-page brochure, this is the moment to fix it.

• Creating a second listing to target a different keyword or a nearby city.
• Using a PO box, a UPS Store address or a virtual office.
• Stuffing keywords into the business name field.
• Listing a tracking number as the primary phone.
• Letting an agency verify the listing under its own Google account. You should own the account.
• Ignoring the Dashboard. Google now shows impressions, clicks and driving direction requests by ZIP code for your listing, which tells you where your customers actually come from.

We treat local search as part of a connected plan, not a one-time listing. In discovery we audit the existing listing, every duplicate and every citation we can find, and look at how the website supports or undermines them. We plan the categories, the single canonical name, address and phone format, and a review process that fits how the business actually deals with customers. We build the listing, fix or create the citations, and make the website changes. Then we improve month by month against the Places Dashboard, rankings for the queries that matter, and the phone calls and direction requests that come from them, alongside any paid search and the rest of the growth program.

For a regional real estate business with several offices, we cleaned up a tangle of duplicate and inconsistent listings, consolidated them into one verified Place listing per office with full categories and photography, and rebuilt the citation footprint across the major data suppliers and directories. Combined with location pages on the website, the offices moved into the map results for their core neighborhood searches, and direction requests and calls from the listings became a tracked lead source. You can read about that engagement at our real estate work.