The first thing you have to do is CLAIM your business in Google Places Fill out your profile completely and accurately. The goal is to be 100% complete which includes keywords, video, photos, hours, etc.
Next, complete company profiles everywhere – especially Merchant Circle, Linked In and the like. You can use a local directory listing service like UBL – it’s not free but can save you a ton of time.
TIP: Use consistent company data … make it match everywhere – same business name, same spellings, same abbreviations, same zip, phone etc.
If you have visitors, customers or attendees that come to your facility, restaurant, offices – you MUST get your profile updated on the MOBILE CHECK IN sites – Facebook, GoWalla, FourSquare, Yelp and any others.
The paper from David Mihm features 79 detected aspects of local search / Google places.
Here’s a short list of places you can get citations (aka listings – aka links) from:
Hat tip to VERTICAL MEASURES for this list of local citations
