DIY SEO: what to do yourself before you pay anyone

Before you pay anyone for SEO, do four things yourself: complete your Google Business Profile, build a steady flow of reviews, make sure each service has its own clear page, and write honest titles for those pages. They are free, they are the same things a good agency would start with, and doing them first means you hire from a position of strength instead of desperation.

I say this as someone who gets paid to do SEO. I would rather a business owner do the basics themselves and bring me in for the harder parts than pay me to tick boxes they could have ticked for free. So here is the honest DIY list.

1. Finish your Google Business Profile

For most local businesses this is the single highest-value free thing you can do. A complete, accurate profile is what gets you into the map results, and a huge number of listings are half-finished. Choose the most accurate primary category, fill in every field, write a plain description with your service and suburb in it, and add real photos.

This is genuinely a job you can do in an afternoon and it needs no technical skill. I have walked through the whole thing in setting up your Google Business Profile properly - work through it before you do anything else.

2. Get reviews coming in

Reviews do two jobs at once: they push you up the local rankings, and they convince the person reading to actually pick you. No agency can generate genuine reviews for you - it comes from your customers - so this is yours to own regardless of who you hire later.

The trick is having a simple, consistent way to ask at the right moment, rather than hoping people remember. I have written up a practical system for how to get more Google reviews without pestering anyone.

3. Give each service its own clear page

A common DIY mistake is cramming every service onto the homepage and hoping it ranks for all of them. It will not. Google ranks pages, not businesses, and a page that tries to be about everything ends up being strongly about nothing.

So if you offer three or four distinct services, each one deserves its own page with its own plain language about that service. This is basic to structure and completely within your reach to write yourself - you know your services better than any agency will.

A page that tries to be about everything ends up being strongly about nothing.

4. Write honest, specific titles

Every page has a title tag - the clickable headline that shows in Google's results. A lot of small business pages have titles like "Home" or "Welcome", which tell Google and searchers nothing. Rewriting them to say what the page is and where you are ("Emergency Plumber - Wellington | Business Name") is free and often moves things within days.

You do not need special tools for this. Look at each important page, ask "what would someone type to find this", and make the title say that plainly.

When to bring someone in

DIY takes you a long way - honestly, further than most owners expect. But there is a point where it makes sense to pay for help. In my experience that is when:

• You have done the basics and stalled - you are on page two and cannot work out why.
• The work is now technical - site speed, how your URLs are structured, fixing pages that compete with each other.
• You need links and authority, which is slow, ongoing work most owners cannot fit in.
• You simply do not have the hours, and your time is worth more spent on the business itself.

The good news is that doing the basics first makes you a much better buyer. You will understand what SEO actually involves, you will have a working baseline, and you will spot the providers who are just going to re-sell you the free stuff. When you do get to that point, read how to choose an SEO provider so you hire someone who moves you forward rather than treads water.

For the full picture of what you are working towards, rather than just the first jobs, see the complete local SEO guide.