Great, my listing FINALLY shows up after about 6 months of waiting and now its shot right down from page 2 of my local search to page 8!! This has all happened just from my making a few changes to 'optimise' my listing as Google recommends, I added a coupon too and now I'm wishing I just left it as it was.

Could this be because it can supposedly take 48 hours for Google to update my listing properly? I hope that's what it is!

Anyway I've also been having trouble adding images, I did have 10 on there but I had to remove most of them, now all that is there is my logo and another thumbnail that says "image not available" (!?!?!?!?!?!?!). It also fails to respond when I try uploading new images, so I'm stuck with just those two.

It's been like that for a few days now too.

I've looked all over forums and it seems to be a really common problem. All my competitors (most of them really unprofessional-looking local companies) are way up there in the rankings and they've barely even bothered to optimise their listings. Most don't even have any photos (even a logo) or reviews... so I have no idea why Google classes them as "important".

Whereas I have (or did have) a description, keywords / categories, 10 photos, 3 customer reviews AND a coupon... if that's not optimised then who knows what is.

I'd expect this sort of behaviour from Microsoft but not from Google!

Whats your site, im gussing its one of those in ur signiture but which one ? as im sure some people on here will have some advice for you.

When did this all this happen ? usually its just a waiting game as sometimes changes might cause you to drop suddenly, but then your site will slowly creep back, depending on what you did of course lol !

Woc

On which keywords and which location your local listing is appearing so that we can check whether you are using correct Title or not

That sounds like a very big step for you, congratulations.

As for other listings that made it there and seemed to have no effort on optimizing at all, its maybe because of being on natural way. Ex. they got backlinks from other site due to other people's recommendation or reference, compare to being optimized and get some "forced" backlinks.