Do It Yourself SEO: Before You Take the Leap

So you want to know how to how to do SEO yourself and get your website on Google.

Many small business owners consider launching an online marketing campaign themselves.

DIY SEO may seem like a better or more cost-efficient alternative, but this is not necessarily the case.

There are many pitfalls that business owners are not aware of when it comes to doing search engine optimization as opposed to hiring a professional or expert.

I did not just wake up one day and rank #1 for SEO Expert in the USA. Many years of learning and experience, combined with using tested search engine optimization best practices was required.

If you are thinking about taking the leap, here’s what you need to know.

To succeed with do it yourself SEO, you will need to have the right knowledge and skills.

There are thousands of websites and experts that claim to provide the best advice. However, there is a lot of misinformation and outdated information on the Internet.

You can easily be lead in the wrong direction.

You will also need to acquire technical skills like on page optimization, keyword research, web design, analytics, and social media marketing. These skills can take a very long time to learn.

This is compounded by the challenge of having to stay up to date with the latest search engine changes.

SEO requires that you continually make adjustments to your campaign to stay ahead.

Download my SEO best practices checklist.

All the demands of building an SEO campaign makes it hard to do yourself.

You are going to eventually have to hire a team to help you.

This means you now have to bear the responsibility of managing a team. Managing a team can be very stressful and challenging.

Taking this on if you are already leading a team for your actual business can be near impossible.

If you want to get the best results, you will have to invest in training them.

This requires that you develop a training program or pay for a third party program.

These challenges are the reasons why 91% of marketing pros agree on the difficulty of managing an SEO campaign.

Even if you are using a combination of outsourced freelancers and an in-house team, it can be tough maintaining team members.

You will have to go through many freelancers before you find the right ones to work with. When you do find the right freelancers to work with, you will see that they are working with multiple clients and won’t always be available for your projects.

If you are bringing in people in-house, you have to make sure that their expectations for the job positions are met.

Employees want to know that they are getting a competitive salary as well as the benefits that come with the job. They also want to see that there is a potential for growth from staying with your company.

What happens when you have to let one go, and they have backdoor access to your systems? I have witnessed this more than a few times.

On top of all the challenges listed above, you will have to learn how to work with a lot of technology. The list includes keyword research, competitive analysis software, and various marketing platforms just to name a few things.

This can be overwhelming for many business owners that are not technology savvy.

It is essential that you learn how to use google SEO tools. Without these, you will never have the data you need to make educated decisions.

To gain a competitive advantage, you need to harness the power of all available applications and utilize them to their full potential.

The most significant downside of a do it yourself search engine optimization is the amount of time it consumes. It took me a couple hours just to optimize this single post.

Search engine best practices are always changing, just staying current can be many hours a week.

Building quality content and managing an SEO  is incredibly labor intensive. There are so many moving parts required to achieve rankings. In fact, it can take as much as 20 hours per week to build a campaign.

Many business owners also don’t consider the cost of doing everything themselves. Investing the time and resources into doing everything themselves takes away from building their business.

Online marketing will start to bring in some traffic in due time. However, the overall growth of their business may suffer due to the demand of time spent elsewhere.

One of the biggest reasons business owners seek a do it yourself SEO solution is to save money.

Forget the idea that it is free to do it on your own. Costs include content marketing, building links to your site,  software, your time, and any technical issues you need to outsource.

Many underestimate the costs of hiring freelancers, hiring/training employees, and paying subscription fees for software.

Business owners will find that the savings are very negligible, especially considering the amount of time that they will have to invest to rank in the search engines.

DIY search engine optimization comes with many risks.

Making decisions based on misinformation or simple mistakes from lack of experiences can lead to your site getting penalized. Penalty recovery usually requires a professional and can take up to several months.

Online marketing is getting more complicated every day, and it is essential that you get all the technical details right to succeed.

Even small mistakes can hurt progress. For example, if you build links to a new site at an unnatural rate, Google may ignore your links for some time as part of their vetting process to avoid spam.

The point is that mistakes will end up costing you more money in the end than creating the search results you were hoping for.

How to SEO your website for free? You don’t without taking tremendous risks.

An experienced professional will use targeted keyword research, competitive analysis, social media, link building, content creation, current best practices, and more.

Do not make the mistake of using a SEO reseller.

My name is Bradley Shaw, I have been an SEO Consultant since 1997.

I know understand google SEO best practices and specialize in all aspects of digital marketing. Let me help you get the same kind of results I have delivered for my clients for 20 years.

Putting my 20+ years of experience to work for you will save you precious money, time and resources. You will be able to focus on your core competencies and drive your business forward.

Grab your free audit and 30-minute strategy consultation to learn more about what I can do for you. Or read more on my blog SEO tips.