I am a person who runs a local business and have ran several in the past. Let us cut to the chase in the knowledge gain. What is SEO. I will lay this up very simple on 3 sides.
Normal Business
A local or nationwide business honestly running one website with social accounts and marketing on a weekly to monthly pages. They have static pages that update yearly and updated post. The SEO is done to a light level and usually have 0 backlinks are in 20 because the links are natural not counting citations and directories.
Lead Generation
A puts or business who puts themselves as the middle man between the business or contractor and the customers. They do no work except for getting the lead so there is no rules they wont break or length they will not go to steal leads from legit businesses. They may resort to bullying, making threats or using aggressive black hat SEO via page scraping, negative SEO and reporting to bury a competitor or remove them off a search engine.
Stuck in the middle
Big businesses, SEOs and freelancers alike play the aggressive game of blackhat SEO and spamming the internet. As a business owner now your forced to go unseen or do the same as competitors.