There are many elements to local SEO that all come together to help websites become more easily found. Some of these techniques include using keywords in the content and images on the website, using social media to promote the website and make it more valuable, creating relationships with other, well-established websites in order to create backlinks to your site, and many more. These techniques can be performed by those who aren't well versed in how local SEO works, however the results won't be nearly as dramatic as when using a certified SEO company.
The reason behind the success of SEO companies is that they not only understand the techniques to use to grab the attention of search engines, they also know how these techniques work in order to get a better result. For example, flooding your website relevant keywords will help your website become more visible to search engines, but newer algorithms can distinguish between websites that are "keyword stuffing" and those that use them in order to offer something of value to their audience. SEO companies know how to use keywords to boost your website's importance to search engine crawlers rather than having it ignored by them.
In addition to ensuring that each technique is performed properly, SEO companies understand how different techniques work together to produce even better results. For example, a website looking to become an authority on a certain subject will not only use content that is informative and keyword rich, they will also create relationships with other websites who are authorities in the same subject matter by providing guest posts in order to obtain valuable, legitimate backlinks to your site. Last but not least, they will launch a social media campaign in order to find people with similar likes and interests in order to let them know that your website exists in an effort to launch a true, grassroots word of mouth campaign to drive organic traffic to the site. The more traffic your site has, the more valuable it is to search engines and therefore boosting the site's credibility with search engines and raising its ranking on the results page.
And these are just a few of the examples of how local SEO can help your website can find its way higher up on a search engine's results page and ultimately earn it more business that you ever thought possible. Hiring an SEO company is one of the smartest things you can do as a webmaster to add dollars to your bottom line.