Can I do my own SEO, or should I pay someone? The eight-job split
A Sussex electrician rang me in March with an agency quote in front of him and a half finished Google Business Profile open on his phone. He had spent two evenings on it in January, got as far as four photographs, and not touched it since. His question was the one in the title, framed the way most trades frame it: is this something I am capable of, or is it a dark art.
It is not a dark art, and capability is not what decides it. Local SEO for a British one van trade is not one skill. It is eight separate jobs, most of them tedious rather than technical, and they do not fail because a tradesman cannot do them. They fail in April, when the phone starts ringing again and the evenings stop.
So here is the split, hour by hour, with the four jobs nobody you hire can do for you at any price, the three where paying wins on time rather than talent, and the point where I would tell you to keep your money.
Yes, you can. Local SEO splits into eight jobs and roughly 134 hours in year one for a UK trade, and Google itself says a small local business "can probably do much of the work" alone. But about 64 of those hours are yours whatever you pay, so hiring someone buys back around 70 hours, not 134. Judge it on that number.
What you would actually be doing, hour by hour
Costed properly, a first year of doing your own local SEO is about 134 hours. That is roughly seventeen billed days for a typical British trade, and almost none of it is the clever part.
The hours below are what these jobs take when they are done to a standard that moves anything, taken from running them on real trade sites rather than from a course. I have kept year one separate from steady state deliberately, because the first year is where the setting up sits and it is the year people quote at you.
Doing your own local SEO: year one, one van, one trade
| Claim and complete the Google Business Profile | 3 hrs |
| Feeding it: photos, hours, services, half an hour a week | 26 hrs |
| Asking for reviews and replying to every one | 20 hrs |
| Photographing your finished jobs properly | 18 hrs |
| Writing eight real town and service pages | 32 hrs |
| Getting your details consistent across the main directories | 9 hrs |
| Speed, mobile, indexing, Search Console setup | 14 hrs |
| Reading the numbers monthly and acting on them | 12 hrs |
| Year one total | 134 hrs |
Illustrative hours on round numbers, not a client's timesheet. At a mid range UK trade day rate of about £220, 134 hours is close to £3,700 of your own billed time, though in practice most of it comes out of evenings rather than out of chargeable days.
That £3,700 is the number every agency sales page wants you to land on, because it sits neatly next to a retainer. It is also the wrong number, and the next section is why.
Google says you can probably do it yourself
The most useful sentence on this subject was published by Google, not by anyone selling the service: "If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself."
That is Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO, and it does not come with an asterisk. The starter guide it points you at is blunter still about what happens if you publish and do nothing: "You usually don't need to do anything except publish your site on the web." Being found at all is not the hard part. Being found ahead of the other eleven plumbers in your town is.
The same page is equally clear about what nobody can sell you. "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." If you keep only two lines from this article, keep those two: you can probably do much of it, and nobody can promise you the outcome. Everything below is about which parts are worth your evenings.
The four jobs no agency can do for you
Four of the eight are yours whatever you pay, and they are the four that move local rankings most. They need access to your customers and your van, not to your website.
Google's local ranking guidance rests on three things: relevance, distance and prominence, and it describes prominence as being "based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have". It adds, plainly, that "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking". Nobody in an office in Manchester can collect those on your behalf.
- Asking for reviews, and replying to all of them. The ask has to come from the person who did the work, on the day, ideally before you have left the drive. An agency can send you a reminder. It cannot be you standing in a customer's kitchen in Worthing.
- Photographing your own finished jobs. Ten real photographs of your work beat any stock library. This is the highest return hour in the whole list and it costs you two minutes a job. I have written the method up in how to photograph your work properly on a phone.
- Answering the phone quickly. Not SEO in the technical sense, and the single largest determinant of whether any of the rest pays. Search sends people to a page; the page sends them to your number.
- Supplying the real local detail. Which towns you genuinely cover, which you will not drive to, what the jobs actually are. A stranger writing about your trade in England or Scotland invents this, and invented local detail is exactly what search engines have got good at spotting.
Add those four up on the receipt above and they come to about 64 hours. Whatever you decide about the rest, those hours are already yours. Which means the honest comparison is not 134 hours against a retainer.
What paying someone actually buys back: about 70 hours
Strip out what is yours either way and a provider takes roughly 70 hours off you, worth around £2,000 at a mid range trade day rate, against a retainer that commonly runs £3,000 to £4,000 a year.
Read that as a tradesman and it looks like a bad trade, and on time alone it is. Nobody selling SEO puts it in those terms, so here it is in mine. The three jobs below are the ones that genuinely resist doing yourself, and it is worth being precise about why, because the reason is never that a tradesman is not clever enough.
| Job | Why it resists DIY | What goes wrong when it is skipped |
|---|---|---|
| Eight town and service pages | 32 hours of writing, and the hardest 32. Most people stall on page three | One homepage competing for every town, so nothing ranks anywhere |
| Speed, mobile and indexing | Needs access to the code, not the page editor. On most builders you simply cannot | The site is slow on a phone and you never find out |
| Reading the numbers and acting | Search Console is free and unreadable until someone shows you which four lines matter | A year of data and no decisions taken from it |
The one that is genuinely closed to you
Only the middle row is a real capability wall, and it is a wall built by the platform rather than by the skill. On most drag and drop builders the speed and structural work is not available to the owner at any price, because the code is not yours to touch. That is worth knowing before you conclude you are the problem.
The real failure mode is stopping, not doing it badly
Of the 100 UK trade websites we audited, 88 failed two or more of five basic checks and 36 were visibly abandoned: an old copyright year, a "coming soon" page or dead links. Almost all of those were somebody's good intentions in January.
This is the part the sales pages and the free guides both get wrong. DIY SEO does not usually fail because the writing was amateur or the keywords were off. It fails in April. The season turns, the diary fills, the half hour a week goes, and what is left is a profile with four photographs on it and eleven months of silence.
The test that predicts this better than any skills question. Look back at the last thing you started for the business in January and ask whether it is still running in September. Not because willpower is the point, but because the honest version of "can I do my own SEO" is "will I still be doing it in eight months". If the answer is no, paying someone is not buying skill, it is buying the fact that it keeps happening while you are on a job in Crawley. That is a legitimate thing to buy, and it is worth saying out loud rather than dressing it up as expertise.
So which are you? Three answers
The middle one is the right answer for most British one van trades, and it is the one nobody offers because it does not fit a package.
What I would do in your boots
Start the four free jobs this week, before you speak to anybody. They cost nothing, they are yours whatever you decide, and after a month you will know what you are actually buying.
Claim the profile tonight. Photograph the next five jobs. Ask the next five customers for a review before you leave. Write one honest page about the town you work in most. Four weeks of that is not a strategy, but it tells you the one thing no article can: whether the evenings exist. Everything a provider sells you sits on top of those four jobs, and none of it rescues a business that is not doing them. Which trades even need this in the first place is a fair question too, and I have taken decorators as the worked case in do painters and decorators need a website.
For my own end: I charge £300 every four weeks for SEO on a site you already have, or £350 with the website built and maintained alongside it. Thirteen payments a year in both cases. If the honest answer today is that you should do it yourself, take the £50 every four weeks website instead: no build fee, no deposit, a free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything, three months minimum, and the site and domain yours to keep at twelve months. I would rather you did your own SEO on a site that converts than paid me to send people to one that does not.