Google Places and SEO

[sponna]

Hi,

We are carrying out SEO work for one of our dental clients and with good success - however, one area we are struggling with is the workings of Google Places which appears to be pretty unpredictable. We have set up his Google Places page, map etc and recommended that he starts to get as many reviews as possible. However, one of his competitors consistently appears top with his Google Places page and our client is wondering what needs to be done to emulate this. The answer is reasonably straightforward for the organic listings (all the usual aspects of good on and off-site SEO) but we are struggling to evaluate the main criteria for ranking "Places" pages consistently.

The competitor concerned is always top with his places page if you search "dentist harley street" - what do you reckon he's doing to achieve this please? Clearly none of us knows the real workings of Google but with organic search at least we can get close - the new localised stuff seems way more random....

Is it simply because he is also ranked very well in the organic listings, consequently Google has deemed him to be the daddy and lobbed his Places details top as well?

cheers
Dave

[Haze]

Sorry to raise this one again but I wondered whether you got anywhere? I have had a few people come to me for seo work, and whilst I can do very basic seo usually as part of a site build, and reading this and that about seo (often contradictory stuff from different sources), additional info would be welcome.