Should I do my own SEO? The Pros and Cons Explained.

June 14th 2022 | By Emma Grant

If you’re keen to grow your business online, then you’ll most likely be aware that you’ll need SEO if you’re going to be successful. One of the most common questions amongst smaller businesses is, should I do my own SEO, or outsource to an SEO agency?

What it comes down to is whether you have the skills, and the time, to do your own SEO. You may be able to pick up some pointers from web articles, or attend some SEO webinars. But if you’re up against tough competition, will that knowledge be enough? Will you know what you need to do in terms of on-page and off-page SEO? How to approach technical SEO? To plan a successful SEO strategy? And do you even have the time to do your own SEO?

Whilst there are advantages when it comes to managing your own online activities, there are also drawbacks. So let’s take a closer look at DIY SEO vs agency SEO.

The PROS of doing your own SEO

Here’s what you might consider potential benefits when thinking, should I do my own SEO?

Saves money

If you have team members who are able to plan and manage an SEO campaign, and monitor it so you know you’re getting a good SEO ROI, and they have the time to spare from their regular duties, then you could save money by managing your SEO in house rather than paying an SEO agency.

No one understands your business like you do

It can be hard to imagine anyone else knowing your business, your audience and your industry as well as you do. The insights you have around how your customers engage with your organisation and their buying patterns are invaluable, plus you’ll (hopefully) be right on top of what your competition are doing, and what you need to do to keep up.

You’re in control

When you do your own SEO, you’re in full control of the content that gets posted, the backlinks that you earn, and the exposure your brand achieves. You’re also in control of timings, budgets and overall management of your SEO campaign.

The CONS of doing your own SEO

Whilst there are apparent benefits to doing your own SEO, you may consider the following as disadvantages:

Insufficient time to achieve competitive results

Do you really have the time to dedicate to doing your own SEO? You may be surprised how much of your resources are eaten into, or the time it actually takes to achieve the results you need to knock your competitors off the search engine top spots.

A little bit of SEO here and there isn’t going to cut it when it comes to making waves. So it may make more sense to hand over to an SEO agency that can dedicate the time and resources to getting the results you need to grow your sales.

Lack of expertise

You may have willing volunteers ready to post blogs on your website, and to try their hand at weaving keywords into them. Perhaps you also have people in-house who’ve said they’ll get you some backlinks, or rewrite your meta descriptions.

But there’s a lot more to SEO than this, and if you’re not an expert in SEO, then you could run the risk of doing more harm than good. Because if you don’t follow Google SEO best practice, then you could end up with a Google penalty, which could see your site disappearing from the search results altogether. For example, if you don’t know how to avoid spammy backlinks, then you could be in trouble.

Keeping up with industry changes is vital in the world of SEO, because algorithms are altering all the time. What’s more, you’ll need a range of skills for SEO to be most effective. You need people who can take care of technical SEO, as well as experts in SEO strategy planning, and experienced writers who know how to create content that converts.

Using an SEO agency, you have access to a whole team of specialists with the full blend of skills you need to achieve the online visibility that will convert into increased sales.

A good SEO agency will be focused on making sure you receive a healthy return on investment. SEO ROI is important, because it ensure you are getting back more than you put in.