Here's what nobody in this industry wants to tell you.
Google changed. Not a little. Fundamentally. The old game was backlinks and keywords and hoping the algorithm smiled on you. That game is over.
Google now runs on an entity system. It's documented in their patents. It was confirmed in their antitrust trial. It leaked through their own API documentation. This isn't theory. It's architecture.
An entity is how Google understands your business as a thing in the world. Not a collection of pages. Not a domain name. A real, verified thing with properties and relationships and signals that tell Google's systems: this is trustworthy, this is relevant, this deserves to be seen.
Most agencies are still playing the old game. They'll optimize your title tags and write you some blog posts and tell you to wait six months. That's not strategy. That's hope with a retainer.