The results answers

Profile changes can register within days. Listings corrections take weeks to propagate. Website work, content and links are assessed over months. Reviews arrive at whatever rate customers leave them. No honest supplier gives a date for a position, because nobody controls the ranking.

Calls and enquiries first, because they are the point. Then position measured across your service area rather than at one point. Then the leading indicators: profile actions, pages published, listings corrected, technical issues closed. Position alone is the least controllable thing on the list.

Because local position varies with where the searcher stands, and a single rank number is a reading taken at one place. You are probably both right about different points. Ask for a measurement across a grid of points in your service area instead.

Distance is one of the three things Google says decides local ranking, and it cannot be changed. A business can hold the top of the map half a kilometre from its door and be invisible three kilometres away with nothing wrong and nothing to fix.

A complete and correct profile, a finished listings audit with corrections submitted, a recorded baseline, and the first website changes live. Position may have moved and may not have. Anyone promising a specific position in ninety days is promising something outside their control.

At about six months in a trade of moderate competition, if nothing has moved in your core service area and the leading indicators have not moved either. That is the point to ask hard questions rather than to renew quietly.

Not rigorously. Rankings move because of work done, because competitors changed, and because the engine changed, all at once. The strongest honest claim available is that position improved while the work was being done, which is weaker than most case studies imply.

Only alongside enquiries. Traffic that does not convert is a vanity number, and a small increase in the right traffic beats a large increase in the wrong sort. In a trade where clicks are expensive, the value of unpaid visits is easier to see.

Nothing immediately, then a slow decline. Profiles decay, listings drift, competitors keep working and content ages. Unlike paid advertising, the drop is gradual rather than instant, which is why the decline is often noticed months after the decision.