Google Places......

[SEOwins]

Hi guys,

Anyone come across a problem with Google places and it impacting organic search results?

I have a client the was ranking top 3 on Google for all local keywords (letting agent).  They have set up Google Places and now appear with a nice Google places ad but the organic position has now disappeared....Gone down to page 8 and nothing.

Any ideas?

Ta

[RobertFisher]

Lawrence,

First I would ask: where are they ranking in Places - page one, number 3, etc.? (The change may not be negative, but need more info.) Has traffic, calls, leads, etc. changed? On the Places ad, did you change anything re categories, address, phone, etc.? Was the organic listing around a different area, etc.?

More info really is needed to dissect this: urls, target area, etc.

If you can supply those you will get more assistance as there are several really good local SEO pros on moz.

Best

Edit: Lawrence, I wanted to find some substantiation before I said this, but there is a lot of wait attached to a verified listing: From Google Places for Business:

With individual listings, once the listing is verified, your information will be trusted more than conflicting information from any other sources. I would really look at the site and see if anything is conflicting with what you have in Places. I am assuming the Places accurately links to the site url.

[JGar-28032]

Hey Lawrence,

It may not be a problem at all, at least not by design. Google began merging organic information with Google Places a while back. If you notice that the title of the Place page on the results page is the same as that of your website page that ranked, this happened.

And when that happens, short of a few cases I have right now it always takes place of the organic listing. Meaning that you only get the one.

In some cases this is ok, as the Google Places page is taking the top spot of the results page. I've also noticed an increased conversion rate depending on the service.

[RyanOD]

We encountered a similar issue recently. We had two pages ranking on Google's front page (lets call them page A and page B). Page A was in the local bucket...page B was below the local bucket in the top 10. We updated our Google Places page to point to the URL of page B. Google moved page B into the local bucket and dropped page A altogether. However, page B did no better in the local bucket than page A.

We have since reversed this decision.