One of the most important ranking factors for Google places is Citations. This is the art of having one's business listed in as many directories as possible.
As with SEO, nothing is written in ink by Google, so studying your competition is key as to why they are ranked the way they are.
I have found an amazing tool call "Local Citation Finder", which will allow us to find directories that Google is "scraping" data from.
http://www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder/
Registration is free, so grab an account now.
Once signed in, you can search for citation listings by keyword, URL, or even phone number. This allows you to get a broad list of directory listings -or- you can zero in on your competition.
Case Study: Jiffy Storage
So basically our client, Jiffy Storage, approached us on wanting to improve his Google Places rankings with the keyword "storage toronto".
With this tool Check out these amazing results...
As you can see, this tool scraped the web for the keyword "storage toronto" took those organic results, and checked if they existed in any other directories that Google Places will aggregate online.
**What I think we should do is add this tool into our Off Page process for any of our customers that also have Google Places and then eventually for ALL customers as getting a head start on this will be crucial!**
Please let me know how you like this tool
