Is it valuable for a local business to build links into its Google Place?

[blahblahblah2015]

G'Day All, Almost all of my clients are geo-based small service-based businesses. I've noticed during my research that the google places for our competitors in 3 separate niches (3 different clients) seem to be the dominating results for almost all relevant keyword terms. I'm curious to see if anyone has actively tried to increase the ranking of a google place by building links into it. Is this something that anyone else sees value to for a local small business? I would love to get some thoughts. And for that matter I'm also curious to see if anyone thinks there might be value to optimizing a Facebook Fan Page or Yelp Business page. They all seem to be key drivers of traffic our client websites so I'm wondering how difficult it is to make them rank as opposed to a website. Thanks!

[blahblahblah2015]

Thanks guys. Very much appreciate the feedback! I'll run a couple of them and see how they go

[JamesNorquay]

I feel that linking to the Google places listings from the company website is still something which you can drive benefit from you can also link to the places locations from various 3rd party sites.

Whilst linking to the places account provides benefit, I feel that other factors have more importance such as the number of reviews, the on site text targeting the page, huge number of citations from 3rd party sites, category's also if the domain name is a EMD (exact match domain) it can provide some benefit to the ranking which I have seen.

[adriandg]

I have asked this question in the past and generally gotten the answer that it is not useful.  I look forward to hearing other peoples opinions on the topic though.

One thing i have noticed in the last couple months with local SEO is that all the sites that really rank, actually really have quite a lot better page/domain/trust rank than the sites that don't rank well.  It seems more than ever it is important to have good qaulity, high authority backlinks to your domain, in order to rank will in local.  It seems citations are hardly that important at all anymore, but reviews still hold some weight, if you can get them to stick in a believable pattern.