Hello Steve,
I have been doing local SEO for around 5 years, and I started doing this as the MD of a company with a £2.8m turnover. Mostly out of frustration at the high operational cost of sending fire and security engineers to West London from Essex. I can honestly say that the results were remarkable, and we cleaned up and beat the local competition, which enabled us to increase turnover to circa £5m in three years.
The problem is there are so many SEO and marketing companies out there, and quite a few are terrible; they can't even rank locally for their own business and bombard social media, saying they can get results for you.
One of my local clients had his best business day ever two weeks before Christmas with £6,700.00 in orders directly from being number 1 locally and beating the competition for all his business keywords. However, the process takes time, and some clients want instant results. Realistically you can make real progress in as little as 3 months with the right local SEO strategy. What I will say, though, is that the actual local SEO work is not overly complex, and you should not be charged vast amounts of money for this service.
Michael Vincent
Managing Director
Strategic Goal Management Consulting

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