Start with the sentence that disqualifies most people who answer this question. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO says that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and tells you to beware of anybody who claims to guarantee rankings, to have a special relationship with Google, or to offer priority submission. It then says, about an agency pitching you an audit, that if they guarantee their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.
We are an agency, and we are quoting that at you, which should tell you what kind of page this is. We cannot put you on the first page on demand and neither can anybody else.
What follows is what can actually be done.
The first page is not ten blue links any more
Before you can aim at the first page you have to know what is on it, because it is no longer a list of ten websites.
Depending on what somebody types, the first screen in Nigeria can carry ads at the top, a map with three business listings under it, an AI-generated answer, a knowledge panel on the right, shopping results, and then the ordinary results. The mix changes by query and by device. On a phone, which is how most Nigerians search, the map block alone can fill the screen.
That matters because it changes what you are aiming at. For a huge number of Nigerian businesses, the realistic first page is not a web page at all.
The winnable part, for most businesses, is the map
If somebody searches for an event centre in Victoria Island, a tailor in Yaba, a dentist in Lekki, the thing that appears above everything else is the local block. Three business listings, a map, phone numbers, directions. Those are Google Business Profiles, not websites.
This is the part that is genuinely winnable, and Google publishes how it works, which it does not do for ordinary search. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and explains each one.
Relevance is how well your profile matches what somebody searched for, and Google's advice is to give it complete and detailed business information so it can make that match.
Distance is how far you are from the person searching, or from where Google thinks they are. You cannot change this one. It is also why a small business in Surulere can beat a bigger competitor on the Island for somebody standing in Surulere, which is the whole opportunity.
Prominence is how well known you are, and Google names two inputs directly: how many websites link to your business, and how many reviews you have. It adds that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking.
Google is also blunt about what you cannot do. In its words, there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and it keeps the algorithm details confidential to keep the system fair. Anybody selling you a paid shortcut into the map block is selling you something that does not exist. Google does sell ads that appear in local results, which is a different thing and is labelled as an ad.
What Google tells you to actually do
The actions Google lists for improving local ranking are unglamorous and short. Verify your business. Keep your information up to date, meaning your full address, your hours including special hours for holidays, your category and your attributes. Respond to reviews. Add photos.
Two Nigerian notes on that list. First, Google's advice to add in-store products does not apply here, because that feature is restricted to retail businesses in a small list of countries that does not include Nigeria. Second, the hours field is worth taking seriously for a reason that has nothing to do with ranking, which is that a listed phone number nobody answers during listed hours loses you the customer who was already reaching for their phone.
You do not need a website to have a Business Profile. Google's eligibility rule is that your business either has a physical location customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are. There are real limits worth knowing: a virtual office you rent but do not work from is not eligible, and a desk in a co-working space only qualifies if it has clear signage, receives customers during business hours and is staffed by your own people. If you travel to customers instead, you get one service-area profile and Google says you should hide your address.
A website still helps even though it is not required, because one of the two prominence inputs Google names is how many websites link to your business, and having your own is where that usually starts.
The ordinary results take longer, and Google says so
For the part of the first page made of web pages, the honest answer about timing is less precise than the one you have been given.
You may have read that Google says SEO takes four months to a year. That wording is no longer in Google's documentation, so anybody quoting it today as what Google says is working from an old page. What Google currently publishes is this: some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months, and in general you want to wait a few weeks before assessing whether your work had any beneficial effect.
There is a harder statement underneath that one, and it is the one almost nobody repeats. Google does not guarantee that your site will be added to its index at all. Its words are that there is no guarantee any particular site will be added, and that sites following its Search Essentials are more likely to show up. Not certain to. More likely to.
For a new Nigerian site this is the thing to plan around. Google says it can take a few weeks for it to notice a new site, that some sites get missed entirely, and that if your site is not linked to by other sites you should try to get linked to. It then adds, in the same breath, that you should not pay anybody for those links because that can be treated as a spam policy violation.
So the sequence for a new business is: be findable on the map first, where distance works in your favour and results come in weeks, and treat the ordinary results as the slower, longer project they are.
Things not to spend your money on
Google maintains a list of things site owners should stop focusing on, and it is worth reading because several of them are still being sold in Lagos.
The keywords meta tag does nothing. Google states that Google Search does not use it. Keyword stuffing does nothing good. Keywords in your domain name have, in Google's words, hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs. There is no magic word count, and Google says the length of content alone does not matter for ranking. There is no duplicate content penalty of the kind people fear, and Google says having the same content on multiple addresses is inefficient but not something that causes a manual action. And on the thing every agency in the world now sells, Google's wording is as flat as it gets: thinking E-E-A-T is a ranking factor, no, it is not.
Google also names submitting your site to thousands of search engines and directories as a typically useless exercise, and it is specific about paid links being a policy problem rather than a shortcut.
One more, because it comes up in nearly every conversation we have. Running Google Ads does not lift your organic ranking. Google says this in three separate places, including that advertising with Google will not have any effect on your presence in its search results, and that it never accepts money to include or rank sites. Ads are worth running for their own reasons. Buying your way up the free results is not one of them.
What first page actually means for you
Before you spend anything, decide which first page you mean, because they are different projects with different timelines.
If you want to appear when somebody nearby searches for what you do, that is the map block, your Business Profile is the asset, reviews and complete information are the work, and weeks is a reasonable horizon.
If you want to appear when somebody searches a question rather than a service, that is the ordinary results, your pages are the asset, and the honest horizon is months with no guarantee attached.
If you want to appear at the very top tomorrow, that is an ad, it is labelled as an ad, and it stops the moment you stop paying.
All three are legitimate. The mistake is paying for the third while being told you are getting the second.