The Playbook · DIY OR HIRE
Do SEO yourself or hire someone?
Do the local SEO yourself: the Google profile, the reviews, the hours. Hire out the technical floor and the pages, because that is daily work and you already have a job. That split holds for almost every small business I have looked at. Below is what each half contains, what hiring costs against the $1,664 Growth bundle, and how to tell it is working either way.
What can you do yourself this week?
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile: every field, real photos, current hours, the services listed the way customers say them. Ask the last five happy customers for a review, and reply to every review you already have. Make sure the phone number on the site, the profile and the door all match.
Those three moves are most of local search for a business that serves one town, and they cost nothing but an evening. The profile guide and the reviews system walk through both.
What should you leave to someone who does it daily?
The technical floor: titles that name the service and the town, descriptions, canonical tags, structured data, a sitemap that matches the site, nothing broken. Then the pages that answer what people actually type, linked to the pages that sell. This is not hard, but it is detailed and it is every week, and a mistake in it quietly costs rankings for years.
Where the line sits
If the task is about your business, do it: reviews, photos, hours, the words. If the task is about the code or the structure, hand it off. Owners who do their own titles tend to write them for themselves, not for a stranger typing into Google.
What does hiring cost, and what does it buy?
On the plans page, care is $149, $349, or $749 a month and does not include monthly SEO. Local SEO Growth is $1,500 a month, or $1,664 bundled with Business maintenance. Authority is $2,750 a month, or $3,149 bundled with Priority maintenance. The Google Business add-on is $250 a month.
What it buys is the work getting done. Most owners know what to do and do it for six weeks. Search rewards the business that is still doing it in month nine.
How do you know it is working, either way?
Search Console. Connect it yourself tonight; it is free. Impressions rise before clicks do, and that is normal, because impressions are Google testing you. Clicks on the pages built to sell should follow within the window Google itself gives, four months to a year. The month-by-month play says what to expect when.
If you hire and the report does not come from Search Console, ask why. If you do it yourself and impressions stay flat for a season, the technical floor is usually the reason, and that is the moment to hand off.
What should you do first?
The profile, tonight. Then the local SEO checklist this week. Then decide whether the rest is a Sunday you want to keep. Every service I sell, SEO included, is listed on one page with its price, and I will tell you honestly if the do-it-yourself half is all you need.
What else do owners ask?
Can I rank without paying anyone?
In the map pack, often, with a complete profile and steady reviews. In the regular results, only if your pages answer what people type and the technical floor is solid. Both are learnable; the question is whether you have the hours every week.
How many hours a week does DIY SEO take?
About an hour a week keeps the profile, reviews and hours current. Building pages that answer searches is more like an afternoon per page, and that is the part most owners hand off.
What is the first thing to hire out?
The technical floor, once. A single pass that fixes titles, structured data and the sitemap does more than months of blog posts on a broken base.
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