You can do SEO yourself

By Tarah Heupel | July 22, 2010

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), many business owners don’t understand how it works or how to use it – so this week we brought in the big guns to help demystify the process.

The SEO Expert

We had the pleasure of bringing in renowned SEO expert (and one-time RSA intern) Stephen Woessner from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse to host public workshops and meet with our staff.

Stephen kicked off the week with a seminar for small business owners, sponsored by RSA and AAF Black Hills. More than 40 people turned out to learn Stephen’s 15 simple steps to SEO, and we’ve heard some great feedback from attendees who took home a step-by-step plan for optimizing their sites.

For those of you who missed out, you’re probably wondering what big secrets Stephen revealed. We can’t give you all the details, but Stephen’s book is a great resource for business owners who want to take a stab at doing it themselves. Want to try to do SEO yourself? Here’s what you should know.

Learn SEO

You can learn SEO pretty easily, if you take the time and focus on it. Going through a book like Stephen’s will give you a simple step-by-step tutorial that will have you on your way pretty quickly. There are also vast quantities of resources out on the web on the subject, so there’s really no excuse not to learn SEO if you have the time and it needs to be done.

And even if you don’t do SEO yourself, it’s still a valuable subject to understand, especially when it comes to working with someone else to get your website optimized.

Do SEO Yourself

Yes,  it’s possible to  optimize your own website. The question is how long will it take you to learn SEO, and how much time do you actually have to spend on it? If you are a business owner or in-house marketer,  your schedule is probably already packed.

In order to do SEO yourself, Stephen recommends spending about an hour to an hour and a half per page, per month. So if you own or manage a website of 20 pages or more, you’re talking about more than 20 hours per month of work just to keep it optimized.

Is it worth your time?

In order for your site to reach its full potential, it needs to be optimized. But whether you should do SEO yourself or outsource is ultimately dependent on how much time you have to devote to SEO. It’s possible that your time might be better spent focusing on other aspects of your business or marketing, and hiring someone to take care of the SEO work makes sense. Hey, some people change their own oil – and that’s really cool. But there’s nothing wrong with hiring someone else to do it, either!

Snaps to Stephen

In addition to the AAF seminar, Stephen also hosted a similar seminar for the Black Hills Home Builders Association. We were thrilled to see so many local businesses turn up to learn more about SEO, and a big thank you goes out to all who attended.

Stephen also graciously agreed to spend an entire afternoon letting RSA staff pick his brain for new ideas on maximizing SEO and social media for our clients. Needless to say, we learned a few new things too.

For those of you who attended Stephen’s seminars this week, what did you think? Are you ready to do SEO yourself, or would you rather outsource?

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