Has anyone found local SEO more important to tradespeople sites?

From some recent results, local SEO tends to - when optimised - boost any results like customer queries, traffic spikes and emails. But what have you found that best works in SEO?

On-page SEO has definitely also helped rank many trades sites. It seems a combi of local SEO and on-page may work better than expanding to lots of inbound links.

I'm interested to hear from any freelancer or agency who worked with a tradesman site and found local SEO work the better option.