Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A little while back a whole heap (around 5000) of exact match anchor text links showed up in my GWT profile.

Now over time quite a few of them have dropped away, but according to Remoovem I've still got a 73% link percentage score for this particular anchor text (which is my main keyword), along with a 55% root percentage. Obviously this is a Bad Thing.

What would be the best way to combat this over optimised profile?
Disavow the links? Leave them be and work on more exact match links?

When I look at some links listed in GWT, I can't find the link to my page anywhere in the source code. Can I ignore those domains or should they also go into a removal program?

I've not received any manual penalty or notice in GWT, though I did see a drop of traffic last year around the early may 'Phantom' update. From which the site has never really recovered.

Miriam,

Thanks for that response.

One clarification:
You can also work to add on-page testimonials from clients in these service cities to the respective city landing pages

I'm assuming you mean links from clients websites in these areas to the respective pages on my site.

If I do a search for my service without any location modifier, all the results in the local pack are for a city 30 miles away where I have no physical presence. I appreciate that this local pack will change dependent on my/the searchers actual location, but it seems a bit off that 'out of the box' Google is suggesting businesses in a city 30 miles away. Does it default to the nearest city? Or does it look at a density of related businesses and assume that area should be shown? If so, how does one compete? Organic SERP for that particular city? If we add a county modifier the local pack results are now a little bit more widespread. Ideally this is where I'd like to place for local pack rankings.I've been working on gaining local citations and going back through old NAP mentions and having them updated. What else could I do to to improve those county level local pack results?

If I add my local town modifier to the search my site appears in the local pack at #4.  So Google seems to be picking up some of my info.

My business is based in Suffolk, UK, but I serve an area that includes Essex, Cambs, Herts and Norfolk.

I've been making an effort to include a constant NAP across all my local citations for Suffolk in an effort to rank better in local search.
However, what effect does this have on pages when trying to rank for searches for areas where I have no physical location? If my entire site has NAP across it referencing Suffolk, does this impact the ability to rank organically for areas outside Suffolk?

If so, what would be the best practice for increasing organic rank in these areas?