Can I do SEO myself?

What you can do yourself

None of this needs technical skill. It needs an hour or two a week, roughly, until it is done.

1. Claim and complete your Google Business ProfileEvery section: the right primary category, services, hours, description and photographs. See our Google Business Profile guide.
2. Ask every customer for a reviewIn person, with a link. Then reply to each one. See how to get more Google reviews.
3. Make your details consistentThe same name, address and phone number on your website, your profile and every directory.
4. Give each service its own pageOne page per thing you sell, written the way a customer would ask about it.
5. Write clear page titlesWhat you do and where, in plain words: “Boiler Repair in Acomb, York”.
6. Set up Google Search ConsoleIt is free, and it shows the searches you already appear for.
7. Check your site on a phoneCan you read it, and can you call the business in one tap?

The free tools worth having

• Google Business Profile, your listing on Search and Maps.
• Google Search Console, what you appear for, and any problems Google has found.
• PageSpeed Insights, how quickly your pages load, with specific things to fix.
• Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places, the same for Bing, which some AI assistants draw on.

You do not need paid SEO software to do the basics well.

Where help earns its fee

• Technical problems. Pages that will not index, a slow site, a tangle of redirects.
• Redesigns and moves. The most common way a business loses its rankings. See our redesign checklist.
• Competitive markets. When the basics are done and the businesses above you have done them too.
• Scale. Many services, many locations, or a large online shop.
• Time. When your hour is worth more spent on the business.

There is a middle route as well: being shown how. Our SEO training is built around your own website.

What never to do

• Do not add keywords to your business name on Google. It breaks Google’s rules and is a common cause of suspended profiles.
• Do not buy or fake reviews. Fake reviews are banned in the UK, and Google removes them.
• Do not buy links. Cheap link packages are the fastest route to a penalty.
• Do not copy one page for every town. Identical pages with the place name swapped rarely rank and can drag down the rest.
• Do not change your page addresses without redirects. The old ones are what Google knows.