Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the link, WebFeat!

Unfortunately, there are a number of violations going on on your Google Place Page. I will try to recap them as usefully as I can here:

1. You are not allowed to put a phone number in your business description. Only your actual legal business name belongs in that field. What is it? Junk Removal? Or is that a keyword you've tried to use?

2. You are not allowed to use an 800 number as your phone number.

3. You should not use geographic terms in your description or repeat words that are already in your legal business name. So, if your legal business name is Junk Removal, don't use 'junk removal' in the description and do not use the city name.

It's my opinion that these three things have made Google doubt the validity of your listing. My opinion is validated by the fact that when I search Google Maps for 'junk removal covington ky' I am seeing your business listed on the map with a round dot instead of a teardrop.

The round marker tends to appear in 1 of 3 scenarios:

1. Google does not recognize the address as valid (doesn't have it in their system)

2. The business owner did not enter their address fully or correctly

3. The business owner has clicked the box to hide their address when creating their Place Page

You will need to determine which of these 3 things is happening, and you will definitely need to clean up the violations on your Place Page.

Further, when I did a search in G Maps for your phone number: (800) 332-5888 ‎, I am seeing two different Place Pages for what appears to be the same business. Perform this search and figure out which of these listings is your legitimate, authoritative listing and then report the duplicate using the 'report a problem' link at the bottom of the duplicate Place Page.

All told, the listing is suffering from multiple problems. It will take effort and time to get the record cleaned up. I wish you luck and recommend that before you make a move in any direction, you read in full the Google Places Quality Guidelines: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Google's policies are not really intuitive, and without memorizing the guidelines, it's easy for anyone to make mistakes. Good luck!

Miriam

Hi MVBryanB,

There are a variety of choices available to you in terms of markup. The main benefit of Schema is that Google, Bing and Yahoo have all agreed on it as a standard. I highly recommend that you read Mike Blumenthal's article on this subject from last autumn, as well as all the comments following it:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/10/07/a-free-tool-to-build-geo-sitemap-and-schema-org-compliant-files/

Take special note of the free Schema tool Mike links to. I think this resource is exactly what you are looking for.

Miriam

Hi WebFeatSEO, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. Can you please link to your Place Page so I can take a look at it? Thanks!

Hi HawkTV1,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Situations like yours can be very confusing for the business owner, so I do empathize. In thinking your question over, I believe that this part of Google Places Quality Guidelines may apply to your resort:

Some businesses may be located within a mall or a container store, which is a store that contains another business. If your business is within a container store or mall, and you'd like to include this information in your listing, specify the container store in parentheses in the business name field. For example, Starbucks (inside Safeway).

If you want the three businesses to be treated as 3 separate entries, and to be eligible for 3 distinct Place Pages when the are all inside the same building, you will need to get:

1. a suite number

2. a unique, non-redirecting local area code phone number

for the other 2 businesses. Then, if desired, you could have the business titles read along the lines of:

Spa Cuts (inside ABC Resort)

This should be a correct way of doing things. However, if you have the restaurant and spa listed in 50 other directories with an address and phone number that doesn't match the new address and phone number you would be assigning to the two businesses, you are likely to run into a serious problem. Google may become 'confused' about the validity of the information you've provided.

This being the case, your task would also include going to each of those listings and adding the new suite # to the addresses and editing the phone number. Big job! But it can be done.

Good luck!

My pleasure, Gary! It's a very interesting topic!

Hi Gary,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. The little icons you are describing are technically termed 'Place Labels'. See:

https://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&cbrank=3&cbid=-r9iys3bhjpun&ctx=cb&answer=174115&src=cb

Chris Silver Smith wrote a great piece on this back in 2009 regarding achieving landmark status:

http://searchengineland.com/can-your-business-achieve-landmark-status-in-google-maps-31045

But I think this is the post that will be most helpful to you, from 2011:

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/06/16/how-to-get-a-google-places-label

And don't miss the 2nd part of this post:

http://www.iexposure.com/2011/07/26/how-to-get-a-google-places-label-part-2-update

Essentially, there isn't a simple way to do this, but if you read Scott Dodge's two posts on this topic, you'll have the best information out there about how this may be achieved.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Miriam

Hi Don,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Please, check out this post by Mike Blumenthal on exactly this process:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/02/03/basic-places-practices-how-do-you-claim-an-owner-verified-listing/

You are quite right. This happens all the time!
Good luck!

Hi Again,

I'm not sure if you're asking about Yext in the US or something else? If Yext, here is a basic description from TechCruch regarding the paid local listing management service Yext is offering:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/17/yext-powerlistings-30-000/

There has been some significant discussion in the Local SEO community in N. America regarding the value of this. Some business owners are quite willing to pay for the convenience of this service, while others find the price tag rather high.

Is this what you were asking about?

Miriam

Hi Samantha, Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Google's custom mapping tools are free and are probably going to be among the easiest to use and embed in your website. As an alternative, this might be interesting: http://www.esri.com/mapping-for-everyone/index.html However, I'm not certain what their handling of South Africa might be. I see a lot of US-centric mapping tools. Why don't you check that out and see if it would work for you, or if Google Maps would be a superior application?

Hi Search Guys,

Thanks for giving me a little time to look into this. I am familiar primarily with Local in N. America, so I contacted Ash Nallawalla who is one of the better known Local SEOs in Australia. He replied that, at this point, he isn't aware of a Yext-type service for Australia, unfortunately. He also said that things are really Google Places-centric at this point in OZ. Sorry not to have a solution for you. For now, it looks like manual management is the way to go.

Hi Again Echo1,

I recommend you check out CustomerLobby.com. I think you will find some good review-oriented resources there.

I'll look forward to seeing your other thread!

Hello Echo1,

Thank you for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I have a several helpful resources for you.

Rand recently wrote a great piece on just the subject of citations, including commands you can use:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-research-local-citations-after-google-removed-them-from-places

That's a good place to start. If you are seeking a paid tool, Whitespark's is well thought of:

http://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

SEOverflow.com also offers some free local tools you might like to check out.

All of the above relate to citations. As for getting reviews, the first step toward understanding a successful campaign is to know what not to do. Begin with a close reading of all sections of Google's guidelines:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1656749&parent=1656875&ctx=topic

Your reviews must come directly from your clients (not from staff, marketers or any other third party source). Creating a plan for encouraging reviews in a manner compliant with the guidelines is the work ahead of you.

Hope these resources help!

Hello Search Guys,

I am looking into this for you. I will return to this thread.

Miriam

Your are most welcome, DigiJoltMan! And yes, quite true about the proverbial eggs and basket!

Hi DigiJoltMan,

The most recent information I was able to find on this is from 2010 and I have not heard of an announcement regarding Bing changing their policy on inclusion of UK businesses in their Local index. They made a somewhat odd decision to outsource the process. Here are 3 articles/threads to that effect:

http://blog.ineedhits.com/small-business-news/bing-uk-confirms-new-local-business-listing-service-23547769.html

http://ianlockwood.net/bing-launches-uk-local-listings-but-outsourced/

http://www.bing.com/community/maps/f/12264/t/656644.aspx

Regarding alternatives to Google Places, frankly, lack of inclusion there is problematic because of Places' vast market share and visibility. I would always recommend inclusion in Google Places as step #1 for any Local SEM campaign. However, there are many, many other indexes that you can also get listed in. In case you haven't seen it, check out this awesome article on the top 50 citation sources for the UK:

http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938

Hope this helps!

Greetings nvs.nim,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I apologize if my response is run together in a single paragraph. We've been having an issue with that today in the forum.

Google's guidelines state the following:

• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or “refer” users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

Thus, the answer to your question is that you should not use the re-directing URLs.

Hope this helps!

Hello

Whitespark's paid citation tool continues to be the most widely-cited in the Local SEO industry. However, have you tried SEOverflow's Local Search Toolkit?

http://www.localsearchtoolkit.com/

I know it was free when it was released. Not sure if it remains so. Might be worth checking out!

Miriam

Greetings, Bede,

So sorry about the line breaks. We've been having a little problem with that, and I hope my response to you isn't one big paragraph

The process you have been using for your Local clients remains a best practice, in my experience. Not only does this separate the information out as best you can for bots, but it is a good practice for human users who will be signaled upon reach such a landing page that they are looking at information about their own geographic location. You are so right that things keep changing in Local, but this is one area in which creating unique, rich content landing pages is still a smart choice.

In regards to Schema vs., for instance, hCard, the benefit is that Google, Yahoo & Bing have all agreed on this markup as standard. However, definitely read this 2011 discussion at Mike Blumenthal's blog in which Mike opines that rushing to switch from hCard to Schema may not be your #1 top priority:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/10/07/a-free-tool-to-build-geo-sitemap-and-schema-org-compliant-files/

Through 2011, I continued to use hCard on my Local clients sites without issue, but it is certainly smart to acquaint yourself with the features of Schema that apply to Local. The tool linked to from that post is a great place to begin.

Hope my feedback is useful!

Miriam

Hi Ron,

I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. The response Robert has given you is correct. Google's guidelines would not allow the procedure you are describing. The requirements in order to qualify for a Google Place Page are that you have:

1. A legal business name

2. A local area code phone number

3. A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you or from which your employees depart in order to serve customers at their locations (think chimney sweep, landscaper, etc.)

I think your situation is rather interesting, in that I do detect some grey area. What follows is not my suggested advice, but it does point out some of the lack of clarity and potential loopholes in the guidelines. I present this only for educational and hypothetical purposes.

Let's say your band is actually a company with a registered, legal business name. Let's say your main headquarters are your home in San Francisco. Let us further say that you appoint 3 band members as franchise owners. These franchise owners have their headquarters in Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose. Let's say that each franchise owner has a distinct local area code phone number and street address (all under the company's legal business name) and each franchise owner is empowered to take bookings over the phone, hold practices at their facility and that the band heads out from these franchise headquarters to do a gig in each of the respective 3 cities, as well as from your main office in San Francisco.

In a situation like this, one could almost reason that it would be logical for each of the franchises to have their own Place Page.

But in reality, I would call this an extreme long shot, and I believe Google could well consider an abuse of their intended use of the system, hence my warning that this is not my advice. It's interesting to consider, though. Situations like yours are why I would like to see more minutely detailed guidelines published by Google.

In all honesty, I believe your most above board move is to get a very clean, violation-free Place Page in place for your business in the city in which it is located, and then do what other go-to-client business models do: depend on your organic efforts for additional visibility in the cities in which you serve.

When I work with a client like, for instance, a mobile notary public, my process is to get her site well-optimized for her city of location, get her local business profiles created and claimed and then put a plan in place for creating very strong content on her website for the additional cities in which she serves. Of course, both she and I would love for her to be able to have a Place Page for all of the cities in her service area, but this simply isn't how Places works.

I would recommend that you read the Google Places Quality Guidelines yourself in case anything I've written isn't clear: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Good luck with the band! Sounds fun!

Hi Trey,

Sorry I wasn't able to offer you a better response on this one. And that is definitely tough when clients are overly preoccupied with rankings.

One other little question for your consideration: In terms of the 4 top businesses' distance to the Dallas city centroid, how close is your client? Again, my standard thinking would be that this would only affect true local results, but who knows? Is the business ranking #1, perhaps, closer to the center of the city than your client?

At any rate, I'm glad you have a few ideas to follow and wish you good luck. Happy New Year!

Miriam

Hi Trey,

I'm sorry you've been on the trail of this puzzle for months to no avail. I want to assure you that I do understand what you are talking about in regards to the setting of location within Google, etc. I have a feeling the reason asking this question in fora isn't yielding a simple answer is that there isn't a simple, standard, across-the-board reason for the ranking variations that you've observed.

I believe that, as the SEO on the project, your best shot will be to use whatever competitive analysis tools you prefer (we have awesome ones here at SEOmoz) to see if you can spot a meaningful difference that would explain why Google feels one site is more relevant to the query than the other, if the person is searching from within the city in question. It may turn out to be something as simple as a title tag structure that favors the local term to something as complex as the authority or locale of the links pointing to one site or the other. It will take some digging and is not something that can be answered at a glance.

That being said, I'd like to throw a couple of notes in here for your observation.

Using your hypothetical query (I understand this isn't really your client's industry or city), I see slight variations in rankings when I search for 'web design dallas' from my own city in California, 'web design dallas tx' from my own city in California and 'web design dallas' when setting my location to Dallas, TX. The top 4 businesses are all moving around slightly within the top 4 positions for these very slightly different searches.

What makes me curious about this situation is that 'web design' is one of the few local queries for which Google refuses to show local results. Their policy is not to treat web design firms as local, but looking at the little ranking variations, I have to wonder if some of the local search ranking factors are being applied under the surface. Now, what I don't know is if your client is actually a web design firm or in one of the other few industries that are barred from inclusion in local search. If they are, I wonder if Bill Slawski at SEObytheSea has written about any patents that might speak to these observable variations. It might be worth contacting him directly about this. He's very good.

There are also the effects of personalization to consider, and whether this is causing any of the ranking variations.

The upshot is, I can't provide a simple answer because I believe in-depth analysis will be required to discern the differences, however large or small, that might be causing Google to handle the results this way. It's probably going to be slightly different in every case. I think you've got a big challenge to surmount...and I hope you don't have one of those difficult clients who pins all expectations on rankings instead of conversions.

Sincerely wishing you good luck in your work and I would be very happy to hear from you if you managed to discover what you feel the solution is!

Miriam

Greetings!
I wanted to provide some resources for you to review before making a decision on this. Here is an SEOmoz discussion on this same topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/call-tracking-and-local-seo

Here is an article from 2009 by David Mihm which continues to be pointed to in most discussions of call tracking:

http://searchengineland.com/be-wary-of-call-tracking-numbers-in-local-search-26895

Here is a detailed and excellent article from Chris Silver Smith regarding cloaking and call tracking:

http://searchengineland.com/for-local-seo-lack-of-call-tracking-solution-spawns-cloaking-70198

I believe that a read of these three resources will give you all of the information you need to make an informed choice regarding the risk/benefits of call tracking in a local campaign. Good luck!
Miriam

Hi Trey,

I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A and just wanted to pop in to mention that Google does not show Places results for web design companies. They haven't since January of 2010, if I recall correctly.  Definitely check out the tutorial JP has mentioned, but bear in mind, your efforts to rank organically for any term are pretty much going to come down to the old standby's of how the site is optimized, linked within, linked to, marketed and used by humans.

Miriam

Hello Waquid,

Thank you for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Members are doing a good job trying to share what they've personally seen in terms of updates. However, I don't believe that anyone can provide a simple answer to your question regarding if/when your client should see a change in his rankings. The reason for this is that while you are working on your client's properties, his competitors are working on theirs. So, for example, let's say that you have amassed some citations for your client over the past two weeks. During those same two weeks, a competitor has amassed a bunch of new reviews. None of this is occurring in a vacuum and the data is constantly changing. It appears to me that citation sources are updated at least once a month, but this is pure speculation. Also, you mention having had to remove duplicates and 'fix' listings - indicating that the business in question may have violated Google's policies in the past. If this is so, the degree of the violations may play a big role in how quickly Google may be willing to 'trust' the profile again.

So, as I've said, there just isn't a simple answer here. My advice to is to educate the client about the work you are doing and the vital nature of cleaning up his record so that he can work towards becoming trusted. I never make promises of high rankings or set specific dates with my own Local clients because this sets incorrect expectations for them. Instead, show that the what you have done to clean up records, amass reviews, citations, links, improve the geo hooks in their website, etc., and let them know that you are doing everything possible towards improving their standings. This is the most any Local SEO can do, giving the competitive, complex, changing and often buggy nature of Places.

Miriam

Hello Jamesjd7, Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I want to be sure I'm understanding your query correctly. Does the OC in your domain name refer to 'Orange County' or something else? You don't mention what the OC stands for. Where is your business physically located? In Orange County? In Los Angeles County? Some more details would be helpful.

Thanks! Miriam

Hi David,

Nice to see you again! I want to be sure to link to a 2009 interview of Carter Maslan that covered this very topic. Though Carter's advice was meant to be taken as opinion rather than facts straight from Google, his remarks are really relevant to what you are asking about:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml

This is the part of the interview I'm referencing:

Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address?

Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location.

That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses.

Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example?

Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through.

We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business.

Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock?

Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page.

Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location.

Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results.

If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi.

In your shoes, my advice to this client would be this:

1. Keep the basic contact information on the landing pages front and center. Put the complete NAP (name-address-phone number) first on the page in hCard. Follow this up with whatever the pitch is.

2. Hire a good copywriter to write 3 -5 paragraphs of unique text for each of the 10 pages.

3. Hire either a designer or video specialist to create a unique chart of statistics or a great video for each of the 10 locations. In addition to displaying this media, describe it in text.

With these steps, the pages will be rich enough and different enough so that they don't simply come across as cut-and-paste jobs. Whatever is created should be specific to the town being targeted - whether this is a description of the location, the building, the office, crime statistics or what have you.

Yes, this takes effort, but every website owner has decided to opt into the publishing business and this is their time to get publishing!

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Jesse,
Thank you for coming to Q&A to ask your question! Here are Google's Places Guidelines in full for your perusal:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

The main rule that applies to the situation you are describing is this one:

"Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing."

The clients you are describing are certainly making in-person contact with their clientele.

Google is well aware of the fact that there are millions of go-to-client businesses (chimney sweeps, landscapers, window washers, etc.). The trouble is that they have tended to treat these business models as though they were less deserved of their attention, not offering very specific guidelines for them.

But, basically, any business that makes in-person contact with its customers qualifies as local. Whether the customers come to you or you go to them doesn't matter. So, if the home is the office from which the business owner is going out to serve his customers, it is perfectly accurate to list his home address as his headquarters.

What I have found to actually be the most difficult aspect of this in the years I've been doing Local SEO is that many business owners who operate out of the home are concerned about privacy. Some do not want their home address out there on the web either because they simply value privacy or because they are concerned that customers may come by their home expecting it to be a walk-in office. So, this is something that each home-based business has to make a decision about: is inclusion in Google Places worth these risks? If they are truly competitive, the answer will probably be yes, because non-inclusion pretty much means invisibility.

Regarding P.O. Boxes, virtual offices and the like,  this is not an allowed option, as stated in the guidelines:

Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.

Regarding Google's service radius tool - be careful using this. There is little evidence that it helps one to rank in cities outside of one's physical location, whereas I have seen evidence that using the tool too broadly can have a rather negative effect. I prefer not to use it for my clients.

Over the years, I have often written about the need for Google to start treating this massive number of go-to-client business models as equally important. They've introduced things like the service radius feature, but I feel that isn't really a worthwhile instrument at this point. It's better to focus your Place Page (and other local profiles) on your single physical location and then use your website to build out geographic content for the different towns/cities/counties you service.

At any rate, hope this gets you off the on the right foot!
Miriam

Hi Tommy, From a purely local perspective, it is very important to understand whether the client has just 1 or 10 physical offices. If only one, then the main thrust of his website will probably need to be slanted most strongly towards his physical location. The hope here would be to gain traction in the Local SERPs, whereas any other cities he wants to target, but in which he has no physical office, will be unlikely to be able to achieve high visibility in the Local SERPs. These office-less locations would need to fight for organic rankings for his other desired local terms. There is some grey area here on my side because I'm not positive whether your client's business model is actually local or not. Is there a legal business name, unique physical street address and unique local area code phone number associated with at least one of his target cities? Or, is his business (and his product) totally virtual? In the latter case, then breaking into the local SERPs at all is going to be next to impossible because of Google's preference for displaying true local businesses for so many geo-related queries. I feel like I've started to answer your question, but details like the ones I've mentioned are what one needs to understand before making a positive decision about how to proceed with a campaign. Please, feel free to give further information if you can about the client's business model, product and physical geography - but you do not need to give names or use real keywords. Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question! Miriam

Hi Jason,

If that is the source of the snippet, then the business is more or less stuck with waiting for Google to update its cache. How frequently Google does this for a given site is dependent on many factors. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A but I'm going to ask one of our excellent traditional SEOs to stop by to speak to you about the cache. Hang in there!

Miriam

Hi Jason,

Thank you for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Can you please define precisely what you mean by 'incorrect'? It doesn't match what?

At any rate, first step for you is to do a search in the Google for the text of the description to see if you can find out where it is coming from (someplace on the site, from a third party site) etc. Google takes its text from more than one place, so discovering the origin of what you are seeing is going to be your first move. Please come back and update us on what you find.

Miriam

Thanks for the clarification, C2G,

I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. Speaking from a purely Local perspective, yes, the job ahead of you for the separate insurance business will be to build a good website with strong geographic hooks in it, following basic local optimization best practices. You will want to linkbuild to the site. Off the site, you will want to claim any existent profiles, make sure there are no violations on any of them, check for duplicates and other problems and fill in the blanks where there are not currently listings but should be.

In my opinion, the absolute easiest tasks are for brand new businesses with no Internet presence at all, because you are starting from scratch and have total control over getting things done right the first time around. I find it a little more challenging doing the sleuthing for an existent business in order to turn up all records that pre-exist for their business to verify their correctness, but this is certainly not impossible.

Regarding reserving the domain name...it has long been considered a good trust signal with SEs to purchase a domain name for at least a few years at a time. Insurance is a dog eat dog world...you want to encourage the client to do all he can to appear trustworthy.

Greetings, Michael!

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. While a complete audit of both businesses would take some doing and is really beyond the scope of what I can do here in the forum, I think the obvious reason one of those business is ranking for 'best bar' is that the name of the business is 'best bar  (b que)'.  Google may be understanding queries for 'best bar' as having an intent to find this business.

Other members are taking a proactive stance in asking you what you are doing for your business. Are we all reckoning correctly that these 2 businesses are your competitors? If so, have you done everything possible for your own business, in terms of a local search marketing campaign. Specifically,

How strong are the local hooks in your website?

How strong is your local content?

Have you got a good link profile pointing to the site?

Is your Google Place page violation free and complete?

Are there duplicate listings or other problems that could be tanking your rankings?

Are you actively encouraging Google-based user reviews? Does any competitor have more reviews than you?

Are you listed in major third party local business indexes and review sites?

Are you building up a strong citation profile to your Place Page?

Shane Thomas is right to mention the importance of reviews - but I did want to be sure to mention that Google and most other review entities specifically forbid the use of incentives in exchange for reviews. You must inspire happy customers' goodwill rather than attempting to give them bonuses if they will review your business. And Yelp doesn't want you to ask for reviews at all (though this is something of a grey area).

It's smart to look at the competition, absolutely, but the only thing you can control is what you are doing with your own business. Hopefully some of these ideas will be helpful to you! Good luck!

Miriam