Google Places: Bad advice

This was sent to me by a client that was approached by a ‘SEO’ company and shows how ruthless some companies are in trying to attract website owners to pay for their services. It contains some glaring inaccuracies and attempts to charge £900  for a Google Maps listing  for the year. If you didnt know any SEO / Web site design company or indeed website owner can create a  Google Places listing for free, we include this listing as part of our SEO packages. The text also states that 70% of website searches click on a google maps listing, the latest research I read puts it closer to 15%.
SEO review
Your website is already search engine friendly and ranks very well for terms relating to your local area. The areas that we would suggest expanding to would be too include [other local areas] where there is a good volume of search traffic. What we would suggest would be a website ready package for these areas which would cost £99. This would include full key word research to find the best search terms to target in terms of traffic relating to your business as well as detailing what should be included on the website to focus on these terms. There is full phone support for 28 days included. We would then need a £100 per month SEO package to boost your website’s popularity on the internet and boost your rankings. We don’t tie you in to a long terms contract and although it would take some time to get you ranked you would only have to carry on paying as long as you are satisfied with the service that you receive.
The other option that we would suggest is a Google Maps Listing. This is an area the we specialise in and can be done without making any changes at all to your website. For the term ‘generic term in an area’ there are 19 searches every day and with the first page of results returning a map box at the very top of the page, we can get you into that listing within three months. The cost of £150 a month for these three months and then £50 a month to maintain it as long as you would like the listing to remain. With around 70% of the clickthoughs going through these listing not to mention the number of searchers that just phone straight up without visiting the website they are a prime place to get your site displayed.