What local SEO results should I expect in the first three months?

The first month is mostly repair. Your profile is verified and completed, categories are reviewed, wrong details across the web are found and corrected, and the website's most important pages are checked for the area and services they mention. You should receive a written list of what was found and fixed, with links, not just a statement that 'optimisation was done'.

The second and third months are about building. Weekly posts and photos go up, a review routine is running and new reviews are arriving from real customers, and new or rewritten pages are live. At this stage it is fair to expect movement in the numbers Google's profile insights show — searches that found you, calls, direction requests and website clicks — and in tracked map positions for your main searches from a few locations. Movement can be modest. Searches with little competition often improve first; the big, obvious ones like 'restaurant in F-7' come later, if at all.

Use the three-month point to ask hard questions. Can the agency show exactly what was done each month? Are the reviews genuine and the replies sensible? Has anything measurable moved, even slightly? If the answer to all three is no, change the plan or the provider. If the work is visible and the trend is up but slow, that is how local SEO normally behaves, and stopping then usually means losing ground that was just starting to build. Ask for monthly reports to show the same tracked searches every time, so the comparison is fair.