Can I Do SEO Myself?

It’s the ultimate question every SEO has been asked. At the end of the day, the simple answer is: yes. Yes, you can do Search Engine Optimisation yourself! But this simple answer doesn’t really get into the question the way it should. While anyone can do SEO, not everyone should (or more specifically, should do it all) and we’re going to explore why in this article.

What does SEO involve?

There are no quick fixes or one-and-done strategies when it comes to SEO. It is a moving beast that requires dedicated time, planning, and reviewing to make it work for your site. A few key areas that an SEO will cover when reviewing and optimising a site include:

Website audits
Keyword research
Strategy
On-site optimisation
Content creation and optimisation
Off-site optimisation
Link building and PR
Ongoing analytics
Technical optimisation (requiring development skills)

An SEO is also an analyst, a developer, a writer, a designer, and a marketer, in varying levels. Sometimes they have a team to help them, sometimes they do it all themselves, but either way, there are a lot more factors and skills involved than you may think on the surface.

What should I do myself?

We love when clients and colleagues understand SEO, so we can work together to smash their goals, and we love talking to like minded people about their company’s SEO efforts! We are big believers in everyone having some knowledge of the field – especially for such a versatile service, which is important to any business with a website. But we also believe you don’t need to have in-depth knowledge of SEO to implement it in your business at a foundational level.

Some things we suggest if you want to do some SEO yourself include:

Create a Google Analytics and Search Console account if you haven’t already (grab the step-by-step guide for GSC here)
Learn about content optimisation so you can update and tweak your content regularly (we suggest our Guide to Writing Copy for SEO! This will give you lots of great information to get you started, including keyword research, another important area)
Reach out to relationships for link building
Sign up to digital marketing news EDMs to stay up to date with any changes in the SEO and digital landscape

What should I get help with?

There are a lot of areas of SEO that are very complex and even the things that seem easy on the surface can go much deeper. While we encourage everyone to understand and do SEO where they can, like any skill, being an SEO expert takes years of learning, which is why it’s a full time job (or otherwise we wouldn’t be writing this article in the first place!).

Some things we highly recommend hiring an expert for include:

Content strategy and pillars, so you have a guide that has been developed with an SEO eye and ideas backed up by data
Technical SEO, such as website performance (page speed), schema markup, metadata, URL structure, and alt tags, as these can often be quite complex and require developer skills
Competitor analysis as SEO specialists often have access to tools that can give them deep insights into your competition, we’re also great at looking at the data and pulling key insights which leads us to our final point;
Analysing data and reporting as specialists have access to various tools, but they also understand how to use them all! They’ll give you easy-to-digest data after they’ve sifted through the bulk of it

Why expert help matters

Unless you are in it every day, the ever changing nature and increasing complexity of SEO means doing it on top of other work is near impossible. While there are elements you can integrate into your daily tasks, it is important to really dedicate time to understanding the landscape, competitors, and changes. This is why having an in-house team, full time specialist, or SEO agency on your side can make a huge difference. They keep up with changes, see how competitors are moving, identify problems sooner, and are passionate about what they do. Having a specialist on your side also means you can focus on other things, ultimately saving you time and money, and helping your business grow online and offline.

You can definitely do SEO, and we encourage building a general understanding of the field and jumping on the tools to see what you can get from them. However, it can be a complex and in-depth beast, so if you need help or advice, we live and breathe SEO and are keen to help! Get in touch if you want to learn more.