Legal Marketing Guru - Dan Hynes Blog

It is extremely important that your business have a google places account (Or multiple ones if you have multiple offices). These listings will often appear high in search engine results. We can help you set up your place account. Besides filling in your profile information, different things can affect how well you rank.

Research has shown the following to be important factors in a high ranking:

Top 3 Factors To Improve Ranking For Pages In Integrated Results

1. Places page category matches a broader category than that of the search (search for “pizza”, Places category = restaurant). This only applies of course if there is a broader category. This applies for both primary and secondary Places page categories.
2. The search category appears in the business name (“Rocky’s Pizza” for a “Seattle pizza” search).
3. The search category appears in the “at a glance” section.

Top 5 Factors To Improve Ranking For Pages Not In Integrated Results

1. Having 5 or more Google reviews.
2. Location term in “at a glance” section. (Seattle in “Seattle pizza”)
3. Category term in Google review content. (pizza in “Seattle pizza” is in the contents of the Google reviews)
4. Category term in business description.
5. Category term in “at a glance.”

• Having a physical address in the city of the search did not turn out to be a strong ranking factor, only distance from centroid seemed to matter. So, if you are just outside the city and your address is not officially in the city, this didn’t seem to hurt any more than a business whose address was in the city, but just as far from the centroid.
• That said, for every mile away from the centroid, ranking dropped by .4 (4/10ths) of a position.
• An average Google Review score of 1 or less significantly hurt ranking (as expected), although the incremental increase in ranking as the review score increased from 2->3->4->5 ranking was negligible (interesting, no?).
• The presence of a business description did not help ranking, although having the search category in the business description did help ranking.
• Getting your 5th Google review significantly helped ranking, although incremental reviews between 1 and 4  and above 5 had a very small impact on ranking (you have to get 100+ of reviews for it to help ranking any more than just 5, so good news for much-loved businesses and review spammers).

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-places-ranking-factors-the-phd-version-114839