What Do SEO Agencies Do – Can You Do It Alone?

“Can I do SEO myself?”… Yeah, of course, you can, and you should definitely give it a go. But, be honest, do you think you can do it successfully?

What do SEO agencies do?

SEO agencies work with clients in a variety of industries to improve search engine result page rankings and optimise for relevant keywords.

Each agency may have its own process but some key steps are done by all good agencies.

The first of these steps is a page-by-page site audit to truly understand the performance of your site. From that, they can solve any immediate issues and offer their knowledge and skills to help optimise your content and site.

The main task of an SEO agency is keeping your site up to date. Any changes to the algorithm, issues with content, or changes in search are all monitored and where changes need to be made to your site to better rankings they make them for you.

Can I do SEO myself?

‘Can I do SEO myself?’ As we’ve previously discussed in our ultimate guide to hiring an SEO agency you can absolutely do it yourself. We are strong advocates for small and large businesses alike, to strike out and try search engine optimisation themselves.

We even have our own platform specifically designed to support SMEs to take their SEO into their own hands! Check out our DIY SEO platform for more information.

But, we have to be honest; you certainly won’t receive the same results as you would with an agency.

For more on doing SEO by yourself or with an SEO agency, take a look at our ultimate guide to working with an SEO agency. 

Reasons For

You and your team will know your business backwards, forward, up, down and all around – more than anyone else out of your circle possibly could. So you’re starting with a strong knowledge of your products, services and brand. Pair that with an insight into your existing customers and clients, and you’ve got a strong foundation for positioning your offerings and weaving that into your online marketing efforts.

Taking your search engine optimisation into your own hands means investing in your team, and taking the time to upskill and train team members, who will hopefully stay for the long run. Ultimately, you’ll have some pretty good basic knowledge of a complex digital marketing technique in-house.

A business will save more money in the short term if they decide to do SEO themselves, instead of hiring an agency. The upfront costs of hiring an agency are high, especially for small businesses and way too much for one-person bands, but the wins will come quicker and yield more fruitful results at that.

So to conclude, you’ll have a head start on positioning your services and products to your target audience with basic techniques.

You will gain a skilled, knowledgeable team member that can provide more than they’re already offering.

And, you’ll not spend as much money at the beginning of your online marketing efforts when deciding to do it yourself.

Reasons Against

The odds are really stacked against you; we won’t lie! It mostly comes down to how mindbogglingly time-consuming it is and the number of resources you will need to carry out DIY SEO effectively.

Then, they need to take what they’ve learned to your existing website and online marketing strategy. Your average Kryptonian could probably do this in a couple of hours, but for us primitive earthlings, it could take months or even years to complete successfully.

The superhuman challenge aside, there are also many added costs. While knowing the basics of SEO is essential, a plethora of SEO tools, software and platforms to be successful in increasing organic traffic. If you try to do it all manually, your brain will fall out.

There’s a common saying within the industry: ‘it depends’. That’s because the theory and the basics of SEO are constantly evolving.

Between algorithm updates and new ranking factors, the job of an SEO is never over. You will need to keep and stay up to date with what is, at times, a very turbulent industry.

All in all, the main reason against doing it yourself is time and your sanity. You’re leaving yourself open to a great deal of vulnerability when you could be in safe hands with an agency team.

Why You Won’t Get the Best Results Possible

We quite often hear a combination of the following phrases:

‘Well, I did SEO on my site two weeks ago, and nothing’s changed’

‘I’ve done SEO, but it didn’t work for our website’

As with most industries, search engine optimisation is not a one-off job. It’s a cyclical process that needs to be monitored, measured and analysed regularly for just a chance of competing online.

Your trained team member will likely carry out some analysis but lack the ability, technology, and experience to truly understand, uncover and resolve these issues. Heck, even if you don’t hire an agency to manage your search engine optimisation, we would highly recommend working with one, even as a consultant.

While getting some easy basic wins without a specialist SEO agency is possible, you’re missing out on a vital opportunity to get the most out of your online presence. The more advanced search engine optimisation techniques that are implemented, the more you will get out of your website and organic presence.

Check out the blog – Why you need an SEO Agency now – for more on what an SEO Agency could do for you.

5 Easy DIY Wins

In the interest of being totally fair; we wanted to impart to you some knowledge on five easy DIY wins that can be carried out with little knowledge. Because we’re just absolute legends.

You might also benefit from one of our other posts, Best SEO instruments for small businesses.

On-Page

The first basic win is one-third of the three core elements of SEO. On-page, off-page and technical. On-page refers to the elements of your website that you can change and control. The on-page copy, title, meta description and your slug.

Our on-page quick win for you would ensure that your home page and all subsequent pages you want users to find on Google has a minimum word count of 600. Google, for example, will not bother with websites that have less than 600 words. Google won’t have enough information to effectively crawl your website and just give up at the first hurdle. Lazy robot.

Technical

The second core element of SEO is technical! Everyone’s least favourite! This entails the more technical aspects of a website (duh), we’re talking website security, user experience, page speed and internal links etc.

Our quick win would be duplicate content, all search engines won’t want to rank duplicate but Google most of all loathes duplicated content on websites. Check your site for duplicated content and remove it, and your site will have a good chance of appearing higher up in search rankings.

Off-page

We’re in Link City now. The last piece of the SEO core is how your website looks on other websites. Also called link building or backlinks, citations for local SEO, off-page is all about where people can find your website on different parts of the internet and making sure those different parts aren’t dodgy.

Our quick win for off-page SEO would be to contact your local business directories and get your company listed. This can provide you with tremendous value very quickly!

Content

If there’s any indication in recent years as to where search engines like Google are headed its a focus on content marketing, in the form of blog posts, news or articles etc. Just take one of their latest algorithm updates, the helpful content update and you’ll understand what we mean.

Your fourth SEO quick win is to start writing quality content and make sure it’s based on keyword research and user search trends. Get started with this by using Google trends and keyword planner a very handy free tool for an SEO beginner.

Users

Last, of all, your SEO should be written, designed, and carried out with your current and potential users in mind at all times. Don’t write to satisfy a low-difficulty target keyword just to get on the first page of search results. Write useful content for your industry that genuine people will actually benefit from, that also benefits your overall SEO. Don’t write that post because you want to, write it because it offers something that will help your users.

With that in mind, our quick win would be to read more articles in your industry, get on top of what your user search intent is, and write content around that.

Thanks for reading our post; there’s a lot more where this came from; if you’re interested in hiring an SEO agency, take a look at our SEO management services or get in touch right now, and let’s get ready to ROAR!