Ask most business owners what they want to rank for and you get one phrase, usually the broadest possible one. A furniture maker says "furniture Nigeria". A lawyer says "lawyer". These are the hardest searches in the market and, importantly, the least useful ones even if you won them.
There are three kinds of search that bring in work. They need different things, they take different amounts of effort, and they are worth attacking in a specific order.
One: your name
Covered elsewhere on this blog in more detail, but it belongs at the top of the list. Someone who searches your business name is already sold. They heard about you somewhere and want your number. If that search fails you are losing customers who had already decided.
This is the cheapest search to win and the most expensive to lose. It should be correct before you spend a naira on anything else.
Two: the service plus the place
This is the search that pays the bills. "Generator repair Ikeja". "Corporate caterer Abuja". "Haulage company Port Harcourt".
The person typing this has a problem and a location and is looking for someone to solve it. They are not browsing. They will contact two or three businesses from the results and give the job to whoever answers properly.
Winning these needs three things working together.
A page about that specific service. Not a line on a services list -- an actual page, with its own address, about that one thing. A business with six services and one page describing all six is asking Google to rank a general page against competitors who each have a dedicated one.
Your location stated in text. The town, the areas you cover, the landmarks people use. If you serve several areas, say which, plainly, on the page.
A Google Business Profile that agrees with all of it. The profile is what puts you in the map block above the normal results, and for local service searches the map block is most of the screen on a phone.
The order matters. Profile first, because it is free and fast. Service pages second. Everything else after.
Three: the question
Before someone searches for a supplier, they often search for an explanation. "How much does it cost to build a website in Nigeria". "Why does my generator use so much diesel". "What licence do I need to open a pharmacy".
These searches do not convert immediately. The person is not ready to buy. What they do is put you in front of someone at the exact moment they are forming an opinion about what the work involves and what it should cost -- and if you are the one who explained it clearly, you are the one they contact when they are ready.
This is what a business blog is actually for. Not "content" in the abstract, but answering the questions customers ask you on the phone every week, in public, once, properly.
The test for whether a question is worth writing about is simple: has a customer asked you this in the last month? If yes, write it. If you are inventing questions nobody asks, you are producing filler.
What order to do this in
Get your name working. It is a few hours and it stops an active leak.
Then the service-plus-place searches, starting with your single most profitable service in your single main location. One page, done properly, beats six pages done thinly. Add the next one when the first is finished.
Then the questions, at whatever pace you can sustain honestly. One good answer a month for a year is a real asset. Twenty thin pages in a week is a liability, and search engines have got progressively better at telling the difference.
The searches to ignore
One-word industry terms. National-scale phrases when you serve one city. Anything where the results are dominated by directories, marketplaces and news sites -- you are not going to displace those, and the traffic would not convert anyway.
There is no prize for appearing in a search that does not bring you work. Rank for the searches a paying customer actually types.