Can I Do My Own SEO?

The Final Code

That is the short version, and it comes down to one line.

Pride only hurts. It never helps. The whole argument, in five words

Hold onto that, because it is the thing actually deciding this question, and it is not the thing anybody thinks they are deciding. Below is the long version, which is the useful one, because the honest answer here is not no.

Most people expect an SEO company to answer this one way. We are an SEO company in Ventura County and we will tell you plainly that you can do a real amount of this yourself. Some of the best local rankings we have ever seen were built by an owner with no training and a lot of stubbornness.

Google says the same thing, in writing, on its own help pages.

If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself. Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?

That sentence is worth reading twice, because the company that owns the results page is telling you it does not take a professional to be found in it. What it does take is that somebody does the work, and keeps doing it after the interesting part is over.

So here is the honest ledger. The left side is yours, and you could start tonight. The right side is where it goes quiet.

You can absolutely do this
  • ✓Write your pages in your own words, the way you explain the job standing in somebody's driveway.
  • ✓Answer the questions customers actually ask you on the phone, one page per question.
  • ✓Fix your page titles so they say the job and the town instead of Home and Services.
  • ✓Keep your name, address, hours and phone number identical everywhere they appear.
  • ✓Put up photographs of your own finished work instead of stock photos of somebody else's.
  • ✓Ask satisfied customers to say so publicly, and make it easy for them.
This is where it stalls
  • ×Working out which searches are worth chasing and which will never send you a customer.
  • ×Doing it every week for a year, including the weeks when nothing appears to be happening.
  • ×Reading what a competitor changed and deciding whether it matters.
  • ×Telling a real drop apart from ordinary week to week noise.
  • ×Knowing when the correct move is to wait and change nothing.
  • ×Choosing what to ignore, which is most of the advice you will read.

Look at those two lists again. The left one is about effort. The right one is about judgement and stamina, and neither of those is something you buy by reading harder.

What beats people is not the writing. It is week nineteen.

Nearly every owner who decides to do their own SEO does a genuinely good job of it, for about three weeks. The pages get rewritten, the titles get fixed, the photographs go up, and it feels like progress, because it is progress. Then February shows up with a real emergency in it, and the work goes back in the drawer.

Here is a year. Each square is one week.

Fifty two weeks, and the plan always covers all of them

You know how this goes, because it is how the gym membership went. The plan was never the problem. The plan was excellent. The problem is that search rewards the boring middle of the year, and the boring middle of the year is exactly when a business owner has a burst pipe, a payroll question and a van in the shop.

Search does not pay out on intensity. It pays out on duration. Three brilliant weeks followed by nine quiet months loses to fifty two ordinary weeks, every single time, and that is the whole mechanism. It is also why results take the shape they do, slow and then suddenly obvious. Stop before the second part and you never find out it was working.

Do it yourself if these three things are true

This is not a question with one answer for everybody, so stop looking for one. It comes down to your own situation, and you can settle it in about a minute.

Do it yourself if you have two clear hours a week you can genuinely defend. Do it yourself if your market is small enough that one town and a handful of services covers it, and if nobody in your trade locally is spending real money on this. Under those conditions an owner who writes plainly and keeps showing up will do fine, and will probably outrank the competitor paying somebody a hundred dollars a month to do nothing.

Get help if any one of those is false, particularly the second. If you are trying to be found across several towns, the amount of writing multiplies fast, which is the thing we worked through in how many pages you need to rank. And if you are already first for your company name but invisible for the work itself, you are not short of effort, you are aimed at the wrong contest, which is a different problem entirely.

Nobody invoices you for the year you skipped

That is exactly why it is so easy to keep skipping it. The bill still arrives. It just arrives in a form that does not look like a bill, which is what makes pride so expensive here. It never presents itself as a cost. It presents itself as handling it.

The searches get taken, not shared.Local results are a short list. Somebody occupies each position, and the person who did the boring middle of the year is the one still standing in it.
Every quiet month is a month of somebody else's head start.The competitor publishing steadily is not a little ahead. They are ahead by the exact amount of time you were not doing it.
You end up paying anyway, later, for more.Catching up costs more than keeping up, because you are buying back ground as well as holding it.

None of that is an argument for hiring anybody. It is an argument for picking one of the two options on purpose, this week, instead of leaving the decision in the same drawer as the pages you were going to rewrite.

What costs you is the pride, not the not knowing

There is usually a second question sitting underneath the first one. Almost nobody asking this is really asking whether they are capable. They know they are capable. They run a company. They have taught themselves harder things than a page title.

What they are really asking is whether it is acceptable to admit they have been losing at something for two years without saying anything about it. That is the sticking point, and it is a completely ordinary one. You built the thing. Nobody enjoys announcing that a part of it has quietly been going backwards.

But the not knowing was never the embarrassing part. Nobody expects a roofer to know how Google weighs a page, any more than they expect us to know how to flash a chimney. The expensive part is the two years of saying nothing, because the whole time those searches are being handed to whoever did ask.

Pride only hurts. It never helps. It has never once moved anybody up a page

It does not show up on a report and it does not look like a decision while you are making it. It looks like being busy, and then one day it looks like a competitor sitting where you used to be.

Find out which half you are actually missing.

Send us your website. We will send back what you currently rank for, the searches your customers are running that you do not appear on, and an honest note on which of it you could handle yourself.

Get My Free Visibility Report

So: can you do your own SEO? Yes. Google says so and we agree, and if you take the left column and work it for a year you will be glad you kept the money. Just make it a decision rather than a delay. If you do go looking for help, go in knowing what to ask, because that conversation is where most of the money gets wasted. We wrote down the questions worth asking for exactly that reason, and it is the same standard we hold our own SEO work to.

Not knowing was never the problem. Staying quiet about it is. Pride only hurts, it never helps, and it has never once helped anybody rank.