Summary: Doing your own SEO can be both rewarding and cost effective. Make sure you know the time commitment involved, and you’re not evaluating the option as a false economy.
Naturally, you might have considered optimising your website yourself. After all, you’ll save money this way, and there’s loads of free info available to help you do a good job, right? Right!
There are advantages and disadvantages of doing your own SEO, just as there are advantages and disadvantages of hiring an SEO expert. You need to weigh them up and look at other factors such as your budget, before making a decision.
Doing your own SEO has many benefits. These include:
- Total control over your website – you decide every aspect of how your site is built, maintained and promoted. You also decide your whole SEO strategy from start to finish so you can decide what techniques you feel would be most beneficial, which are likely to bring you the best results and whether you will use any ‘grey area’ techniques that an SEO expert might frown upon.
- Increased knowledge – as you manage the optimisation of your site, you’ll learn loads! You’ll find out what works and what doesn’t work (sometimes the hard way!) and you’ll discover how factors such as timing, links, on page and off page changes make a real difference to your rankings. Many people who do their own SEO enjoy being part of the SEO community, asking questions and sharing their findings in SEO forums.
- Personal achievement – doing your own SEO is a big responsibility, particularly if your website is important for your business. It’s also a fantastic opportunity for personal achievement as your success is entirely dependent on your well planned and executed SEO campaign.
- Financial savings – if you do your own SEO, you don’t need to pay anyone else. But be careful that you don’t evaluate this as a false economy. First consider your ‘hourly rate’ against that of a professional and then consider how much faster and more efficiently an expert would be able to carry out the work for you.
Another option: work with an expert
This is a great choice because it means you’ll learn loads about SEO, you’ll benefit from your expert being on top of the latest changes in search engine optimisation practice, and you’ll save money. What will usually happen is that you and your expert agree on a plan and agree who will carry out what – effectively, it’s a consultancy service.
The cons are your time – you’ll still need to set aside and stick to a set amount of time for the work involved. You may also need time for locating sites, setting up article accounts, writing content and so on. It all depends how much work you want to take on.
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