How to eliminate a spammy local pack?

[Gsmithmike]

There is one keyword "plumber los angeles" which i was getting rank #3. Now somehow i lost ranking eventhough the citations are correct, and everything follows the guidelines. Honestly i have not seen any improvement in local yet!

The local pack got also spammed by some fake businesses, and even a google plus which has Yelp category link on it for plumber los angeles.

What is the best ways to improve ranking? how can you get higher ranking? should you write more content, or there are other ways as well? will building more links help? should i do PPC or adword express to get more traffic?

 

[warrenpd]

Its hard to tell without more information. Like, are you also ranking organically for keywords you want? How many citations do you have compared to your competitors? Are your citations completely optimized. Are you doing anything that could get you a penalty? If you provide a link we can give you a more detailed response.

 

[Gsmithmike]

Check Plumber Los angeles, you will come up with Los Angeles plumbing and plumber hollywood, and they are spamming the pack!

 

[mborgelt]

There are a lot of things at play here so I will just make some general recommendations. I would report the listing that is using the Yelp URL and try to find a few other violations to give to the MapMaker team. After you submit to MapMaker I would post the changes in their forum as well.

As for your own strategy content is never a bad idea but I usually make sure that the site structure makes sense. Are your folders organized logically? That is to say, are only the most relevant pages in every folder and are they linked in a logical way that supports your keyword strategy?

Content is important to local especially for markets like plumbing which are usually very saturated. This shouldn't be content for content's sake though. With markets like this we like to drill down all of our services down to the minutia like this:

Plumbing [City]
-Plumbing Service 1
--Subservice 1
---Sub of Subservice 1
-Plumbing Service 2
--Subservice 1
---Sub of Subservice 1
-Plumbing Service 3
--Subservice 1
---Sub of Subservice 1

I would boil out a list of services and get as many sub services and sub of sub services that are relevant for the business. Then get the pages written with local content in the, (directions, places/landmarks you are near). That should get you moving in the right direction.