It took me a year and a half to rank on first page for my target key words here are what I believe to have helped:

Business Listings: get back links pointing to your site from as many business listing sites as you can e.g. Google my business, bing places, yelp, cylex, etc

Social media/ blogs: start up pages for your business on all the usual suspects: Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, instagram, Pinterest, google plus, Tumblr, wherever you can post content, information, and PICTURES of your work. Post as much original content as you can and do not just copy and paste the same post across platforms, as this looks spammy. Once again make sure you have links here pointing to your site

Good content on your site: make your website as detailed as possible, with lots of pictures (you took yourself), and lots of internal links (aka links to other pages on your site not included in navigation bar). Also, do not just repeat your keywords over and over. Your keyword density should be less than 3% I believe. Use synonyms if you find yourself repeating the same words over and over. Google likes lots of original content and words, but penalizes the site if it just repeats itself over and over.

Reviews: in my opinion, informing your customers of how important it is to help your business to take the five minutes to leave a positive review if they were pleased with your product or service, helps SEO a lot. Any time an outside party does a positive action on your site, listing, or page, it helps google verify the validity of your business.

Security: make sure you have an SSL certificate from your webhost provider

Facebook boosted post: if you want to go for a paid option, I would suggest a Facebook boosted post. It helps create awareness for your brand to local people who are in your target audience. Getting your name out there is key in the early stages. This option is great as most people visit this site daily and you set your budget so you know how much you will be paying.

SEO takes time and in the beginning your rank will bounce up and down a lot. Do not become discouraged! I optimized my ranking without paying a dime and doing a lot of online research, but it took over a year to be solidified on first page. I just try to add one post/ listing/ improvement a day and it seems to be working so far. Good luck and hope this helps