SEO is a process that requires quite a bit of work, plus advanced hardware and software to ensure great results. For businesses we guarantee placement for, we promise that at three months your business will be on the first page. We need that time for our optimization to start taking effect. The longer a business stays with us the better their ranking and the more customers they will get every single month due to our online marketing, because we never stop optimizing for our partners.
Your friend is half correct. No one can absolutely guarantee first page ranking for Organic Searches, which are searches that will include results from all over the globe and every kind of website. Your business would be competing with things like Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Yahoo, countless blogs, entertainment websites, not to mention basically every other business like yours in the U.S. or even the world. Business Listings work differently, which is why we are able to make our guarantee to select businesses like yours. You are only competing with a few dozen to maybe a few hundred businesses in your area, and you are competing with businesses only, not with all of these other types of websites we mentioned.
Yes. We have experts working on both because they overlap, and in most cases optimization which works for a Business Listing will also help Organic Placement as well. The correlation is not direct though, there are some differences and our main focus is Business Listings because that proves to be the most beneficial to businesses like yours.