Ranking Before Banking

I'm rather interest in starting local seo. It seems straight forward to me and fairly easy from what I can tell.

What I am wondering is: How do you rank a site before you get a customer? I want to actually run through the process before I get a real person invested in me. Even if it was for free I still dont want to be cold calling people until I have proof of concept.

I made a tester site for local seo a few months back. I used a fake address in the footer, but built no links to it at all yet. Its sitting on the 4th page for its intended query.

When the bulk of the links will be using citations -- how can you rank a site and build links if you do not yet have a client? I can only assume building links with a fake address only to change it later when you actually get a client would be stupid.

Is there no way of doing this without first having a client?

you can build lots of citations with no street address, a hidden address, or the address as the city in the address line. But to answer your question, it is hard to have an incoming business be successful in local lead generation if you build the site first..if you want to do sell leads.

Here's an idea: what's your favorite local restaurant/bar/etc? Rank them as a test. Once you've done that, contact them and tell them what you've done - don't ask for money, instead, ask them to allow you to use them as a case study of your skills (for businesses not in their niche, of course)

Good luck! I did a similar thing with ORM back when I was doing it.