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Again, many thanks for your answers and your time in looking at these results. I hadn't even noticed that the first listing hadn't actually claimed their place page (which does surprise me). When you say that a company could achieve the same results by doing appropriate SEO on the local and organic level, I take it you mean SEO on the Places page and local targeted SEO on the main site? Many thanks for your help and advice on this. I wanted to gather as much information regarding this area within the local search before committing to the client. I have done a great deal of research about local search and SEO but was unsure of what was making Google actually rank these sites where they're ranking them. Regards, Michael

The traffic to the site will generate leads for the company who owns the site. If they already have a website that converts then they will know what content to put on this site to create that conversion rate. The buyer is buying the site knowing the potential that the site will have when it comes to generating business for them. I've looked at is as the first page results of Google are a line of shops. The shop at #1 is seen as the shop which gets the most visitors to it. Now imagine that shop is currently being refitted - people can still see the shop and what it sells but are unable to actually enter the shop to buy anything. Now, the person who owns the shop further down the street (i.e is ranked #10 or #12 or #15 etc) - he really wants to own that shop which is being refitted and he knows how much that shop is worth to his business if he owned it after the refit is completed. Although the site I have created is a basic canvas, all it needs is branding by the new owner and it will then perform as well as their current site when it comes to conversion rates. Does that make sense with explaining the view point I am taking on this project ?