The box of three results
When somebody searches "plumber near me" or "hairdresser Gràcia", the first thing they see is a map with three businesses. That box takes an enormous share of the clicks, and below it sit the ordinary results, where you are already competing with directories and marketplaces with far bigger budgets than yours.
Getting into the box depends mostly on three factors Google does not hide: how close you are to the person searching, how relevant your profile is to what they asked for, and how well known you are as measured in reviews and mentions. Distance you cannot control. The other two you can.
The per-neighbourhood page trap
The tactic everybody recommends is a page for every area you cover. It works, but only if each page says something the others cannot. Twenty identical pages with the neighbourhood name swapped is exactly the pattern Google classifies as scaled content, and the penalty is not failing to rank: it is dragging down the rest of the site with it.
The test is simple and has to be applied honestly: cover the neighbourhood name and read the page. If it still makes sense for any other neighbourhood, it does not deserve to exist. If it has a specific street, a market, a fair-day timetable, a kind of customer who is genuinely different there, then it does.
Four good area pages beat twenty empty ones, and they are cheaper to maintain.
What to fix before the content
Before writing a line it is worth checking whether something is broken, because fixing it usually moves more than any new text. That name and address are identical everywhere. That two of your pages are not competing for the same search. That the site loads in under two and a half seconds on a phone with ordinary 4G. That the structured data describes what is genuinely on the page.
That last point deserves a warning: marking up something that is not on the page — ratings that do not exist, questions nobody can see — is one of the few things Google applies a manual action for, and it is a fairly common shot in the foot.
How long it takes and what to expect
The Google profile usually reacts within four to six weeks. New pages take three to six months to settle, and they do it unevenly: up, down, then stable. A freshly migrated site takes longer.
What will not happen is being first within a month. Anyone promising it is choosing a search nobody performs and showing you that screenshot. The useful question to ask anybody selling SEO is not what position you will reach, but what changed, when, and what happened over the following three months.