How we beat two cheaters to rank a client #1 on Google

Last year we took on a client in a competitive Charlotte service niche. Two of the top three results in the map pack were cheating. Fake addresses. Virtual offices listed as physical storefronts. One of them had a UPS Store as their "headquarters".

Our client did everything by the book. Real office. Real address. Real reviews. And they were ranking number 7.

Reporting the cheaters to Google works sometimes. Often it does not. So we stopped waiting for Google to clean things up and we outworked the cheaters instead.

Real reviews, every single week. While the cheaters were collecting maybe one review a month, we got our client into a system to ask every happy customer. Within 90 days they had three times the recent review volume.

Service area precision. We narrowed the profile to the actual neighborhoods the client served well. Specific beats spread thin, every time.

Website that matched. We rewrote the homepage to mention the exact services and the exact areas. Google saw a profile and a website that told the same story.

Photos and posts every week. Real job photos from real Charlotte addresses. Weekly Google posts. Small things, done consistently.

Four months in, our client was number 1. Both cheaters were still cheating. They just no longer mattered.