SEO by yourself?

[smithmary01]

I am an SEO service providers and I follow google guidelines and touch with any SEO updates. I apply is my work.

[mondmaskertje]

I also do it myself. It takes a lot of time, of course, but it can of course save you some money.

If it goes well, you can still outsource it partly.

[myrar22]

Search engine optimization is necessary for all websites and blogs to gain traffic and also good SERP, especially on Google SERP.

Whether you are SEO [nofollow] service providers or not, do you do SEO by yourself?

And how long will you spend your time to do it?

I started my SEO career like this - doing SEO by myself. And now that I have taken on my friends and relatives as SEO clients, I still do everything by myself. I want to make sure that things are done the right way and you cannot depend on anyone to get things right except yourself.

On average, I spend around 3-4 hours reverse engineering competition per website > then doing the outreach for them > getting content written > engaging in forums, etc. I end up spending around 6-7 hours each week per website. Right now I'm doing SEO for 4 websites, so I'd say I'm spending around 25-26 hours doing SEO each week. Not a lot of hours but it's fun though. I love seeing websites bounce around in the SERPs and I LOVE the feeling of excitement when they hit page 1.

How do you do SEO? How much time are you spending?

[bhushansharma]

Most site owners can't even spell canonical tag, yet they'll skip strategy and blame Google when traffic tanks. I spend 10+ hrs weekly - E-E-A-T, link juice, technical audits, because SEO isn't a checkbox, it's a discipline.

[Gabriel7979]

I do a hybrid: content and on-page myself, and I've outsourced technical audits and link building at various points. Honestly the deciding factor is time vs. complexity.

For a small site in a non-cutthroat niche, DIY is completely doable. Keyword research, solid content, internal linking, and keeping the technical basics clean (speed, crawlability, schema) will get you surprisingly far. Budget a few hours a week for the first few months, then it tapers once the foundations are in place.

Where DIY usually stalls is technical debt on bigger sites (crawl budget, index bloat, migrations) and link acquisition in competitive niches. That's the point where hiring help typically pays for itself - but vet carefully.

If you do look at hiring, compare apples to apples: ask exactly what's included (audits, content volume, link tactics - avoid anyone vague about their methods), how reporting works, and whether the strategy is custom or cookie-cutter. A clear breakdown of SEO service packages makes it much easier to compare providers than headline prices alone.

Either way, don't outsource what you don't understand - learn the basics first so you can judge the work you're paying for.

(Disclosure: I help with SEO content for the site linked above.)