<b>The locksmith who won by reporting his competitors</b>

<b>The locksmith who won by reporting his competitors</b>

Meet an honest locksmith in Houston. Real shop, real license, real reviews. Yet the top three map pack slots for 'locksmith near me' were held by listings with names like 'AAA 24 Hour Emergency Locksmith Houston' — keyword-stuffed names, no real address, phones that rang to a call center two states away.

Locksmiths are one of the most spam-infested local categories on Earth. He'd assumed he just had to live below the fakes.

He didn't. Google has a business name policy: your listing name must be your real-world name, not a keyword string. Fake addresses violate the guidelines outright.

We documented each offending listing — screenshots, the impossible names, the lack of a real storefront — and filed redress reports through the proper Business Profile channels, methodically, over several weeks.

For a while, nothing. The reports sat.

Then two of the three spam listings vanished. He rose into the gap without changing a single thing on his own profile — from position seven to position two. Emergency call volume nearly doubled.

The lesson: in spammy categories, cleaning up the map by reporting fakes can move you up faster than any optimization you do to yourself.