There is a strong pull toward writing as though your customers could be anywhere. It feels bigger. It feels like ambition. It is, for most businesses, a way of competing against national companies with national budgets while your actual customers are a twenty minute drive away.
Narrowing to a place is not lowering your sights. It is choosing a fight you can win.
Why local is easier to win
A national search puts you against every company in the country, plus directories, plus marketplaces. A local search puts you against the businesses in your town who bothered to build a proper page. That second group is usually small, and often nonexistent.
The customers are also better. Someone searching with a place attached has already decided they want somebody nearby. They are further along than a general browser, and they are less likely to be price-shopping across the whole market.
What a local page is not
It is not the same page with the town name swapped, twenty times over.
This trick has been used for years -- one template, a list of towns, a page generated for each. Search engines identify it easily now, and readers identify it faster. A page that says "we provide excellent plumbing services in Ikorodu" and is otherwise identical to the Yaba page tells the reader nothing about Ikorodu and nothing about you.
If you cannot write something genuinely specific about serving that place, do not make a page for it. Cover it in a line on your main service page instead.
What genuinely specific looks like
The point of a local page is to demonstrate that you actually operate there. Things that do this:
The areas within the area. People do not think in local government boundaries, they think in neighbourhoods and landmarks. Naming the ones you actually work in reads as real because it is.
Conditions particular to that place. Traffic patterns that affect when you can deliver. Estates with their own access rules. Areas where the power situation shapes what equipment makes sense. A market district where everyone is on the same street.
How you get there and what it costs. If call-out charges vary by distance, say so.
Work you have actually done there, if you can name it or photograph it.
If you serve three towns properly, you have three pages worth writing. If you serve one town properly and would take a job in eleven others, you have one page and a sentence.
The profile does most of the work anyway
For local searches, the map block sits above the ordinary results and takes most of a phone screen. Getting into it depends far more on your Google Business Profile than on your website: the address, the categories, the hours, the photographs, the reviews.
A business with a well-maintained profile and a modest website will usually beat a business with an elaborate website and a neglected profile, for exactly the searches that bring in local work. Do that first. It is free.
Being findable in a place you have no address in
A common situation: you are in Lagos, you take work in Ibadan, but you have no premises there.
Be straight about it. A page that says "we are based in Lagos and travel to Ibadan for installations, with a minimum job size because of the trip" is honest and still useful to an Ibadan customer. Listing a fake address, or renting a mailbox to claim a presence, risks your profile being suspended -- and suspension takes the local visibility you already had.
The thing that actually decides it
Everything above helps you appear. What decides whether appearing turns into work is whether you answer.
Local searches are urgent more often than not. The customer contacts two or three businesses and gives the job to whoever responds properly first. Ranking third and answering in ten minutes beats ranking first and answering tomorrow. That is not an SEO problem, but it is where most of the return on local visibility is actually won or lost.