For those of us really old timer SEO types who can remember back to the good old days when you created your Google Maps Local Business Center listing and they promised it would be visible in 24 hours, welcome to the new world.  How many years does one have to go back to see such a miracle?  Less than three years.  But alas, time marches on and all things become smaller and faster.  Well almost everything.

My client wanted to open up a maid service in Cincinnati.  He had a real address, real phone number, real business license, and even a decent website at http://www.WeCleanCincinnati.com .    So my job was to get him to page 1 on local search.  We did the keyword analysis and determined that housekeeper Cincinnati, housekeeping services Cincinnati, and a few others were primary.

We set out to list him on UBL, InsiderPages, YellowPages.com, and Info USA.  Then, as with all of our clients we optimized his listings on Yelp, HotFrog, AOL Yellow and another eight of nine of the top citations.  Then we created the Google Places Listing, and waited for the post card.

While waiting, we set up a blog and began to post.  We created some solid backlinks to the website, and did some SEO improvements to the home page.  A month later, we began to sneak onto the first page under some keywords for the website.  Another month and we saw Google Places start to show up on the easier keywords.  At three months we hit pay dirt and the traffic started to show up on what was now Google+ Local for keywords housekeeping services Cincinnati.

Most of my clients are established businesses by the time they call me, so it had been a while since I set up a brand new business.  We are wondering if this is now the real world.  Does it take three months to get a Google+ local listing to start producing results on a medium competitive business in a medium competitive city?  What is your experience?

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