Speaking as a layman and honest enough to not pretend I have mastered the art of SEO, I can speak from experience a little on what does work and a LOT on what doesn't work.
First, I've learned it's a slow, labor intensive process and I have yet to find any shortcuts or any provider I can afford who will do even a mediocre job. This is especially true about the freelancer type websites and fivrr where people promise everything and deliver nothing but crap.. either not helpful or even damaging.
First spend the time to make your website as SEO friendly as possible. There are a lot of free sites that will analyze your site and point out flaws. Find them and fix them. Make sure your website is fast and responsive so mobile users will love it too.
Then add fresh original content regularly. I try to add at least one new post every week. Would do more if I had time.
Get all your social media working and tied to each other. Facebook, Google+, twitter at least. Then whenever you post an article, link it from your social media. Stay active on social media as well.
Then start adding quality backlinks to your site. This is the most challenging part at least for me but posting legitimate posts to related articles online with a link to your site is one way. Create and upload pdf unique documents to websites that provide that service.
Register your site on lots of directories (good ones.. not spam ones). I have used Moz Local and UBL.com to do a basic registration. It's not cheap it gets your foundation laid. Then look for industry related directories and get to work.
You can also get lots of potential backlinks by analyzing the backlinks of your google page 1 competitors. Lots of free backlink checkers online too.
Right now, I'm trying to locate possible sites where I could get a modest number of industry relevant link exchanges (30 or so) with good sites (not spam sites) but haven't found any. Anyone here having any ideas on that would be appreciated. My business is hypnotherapy.
Good luck.