Running a local HVAC business in the Peel Region (specifically covering Mississauga and Brampton). For the last two years, we consistently held the #2 or #3 spot in the Google Local Map Pack for our primary search terms.
Sometime around late last month, our listing completely tanked. We dropped to position 8 or 9, and now we only show up in the top 3 if the user is searching from the exact same postal code as our registered office address.
I was looking into this and had a quick chat with an agency handling local SEO in Mississauga. Their preliminary audit suggested we might be getting hit by a strict proximity filter, combined with a few competitors keyword-stuffing their Google Business Profile (GBP) names to outrank us.
Before I commit to a massive, long-term optimization campaign to fix this, I wanted to ask the business owners and marketers here:
How do you combat competitors who spam exact-match keywords in their GBP names? Does reporting them actually work, or is it a waste of time?
Are traditional citations (Yelp, YellowPages, etc.) and NAP consistency still moving the needle for local map rankings, or is the algorithm purely relying on user proximity and geo-tagged reviews now?
Appreciate any insights from those navigating local search right now.
