Many people want to have great ranking with Google… the number one slot! It's not easy and there are a number of factors involved.
Local SEO are the activities you should be doing in order to make sure your website or web 'presence' is found for people who search google with a location added.
In other words they have NOT searched for 'web designer', they've searched for 'web designer in devon' or 'web designer near me'.
The '… in devon' location is the important part. When you add a location to the search Google filters the search results assuming you only want to see web designers who are based in a certain location - in this instance it would be web designers that are based in the county of Devon.