Promotion when you are a small business in the old days used to mean sending sales letters through letter boxes, running ads in local papers and glossy mags and also sending the company details to business repositories like the Thomsons local. In this day and age, while some such methods may be useful, the internet has in fact meant that lots of these out of date.
Getting market exposure for a local business, more specifically the ones which provide services like plumbing etc have now become not so much a case of pushing out info to a large audience & hoping that the company name sticks and much more a case of having a decent online ‘presence’ so that when a person searches for your market sector in your area, it is your company which appears..
Getting positioned in Googles with location based searches for instance ‘plumbers around London’ is given the name Local search optimisation. Local search optimisation is usually much cheaper when compared to national SEO
That said it’s still important to employ professional SEO Consultancy for the SEO.
Using an professional optimisation firm to carry out the work should help to protect you from problems dodgy techniques that could harm ones web brand.