Should Local Businesses in Tampa Do Their Own SEO?

An issue I come into sometimes with new business owners who are trying to do their own search engine optimization is that they think it’s something they can do for themselves.

To begin with, many local business owners in Tampa focus entirely on onpage SEO. They are not wrong in doing their onpage optimization, but they are dead wrong in thinking that this is in any way going to move their website. A website needs links to rise in the rankings or rank for anything meaningful. That means that if you want to rank for anything hat is actually going to get you a return on investment, you need offpage SEO. Practically everyone knows how to do onpage optimization. You can Google it now and learn it in about 10 minutes.  Sure, it will take a lot longer than that to implement, but it’s really not that hard.

People don’t want to do offpage SEO because it’s hard and time consuming and requires that you have existing relationships. There’s a huge barrier to entry. It’s very difficult to learn, especially if you are attempting trial and error. Google uses time to its advantage. Links won’t kick in for months now, so this makes it much harder to know what works. If you are a single business owner with just one website (yours) then you practically have zero chance of figuring this out. There are SEOs with hundreds of websites for themselves and their own clients who still don’t really understand what works. This is mostly because they don’t track everything and keep good records. Honestly, it’s tedious and time consuming. Also, there’s not much immediate gratification at all. It is a long term strategy and not something you want to get into unless you want to make a career out of it.

I’ll put it this way. Don’t try to do your own surgery. Could you learn everything you need to do, get all the tools, do a lot of trial and error on yourself. But, why would you do that? It would take an extremely long time and you’ll tear up your body in the process and still not get as good results as if you entrusted a competent surgeon to just do it for you. Put simply, unless you’re planning on building a business where all you do it offer SEO to your clients, it’s not worth learning.

It’s very complex, requires a large amount of resources that takes months or even years to build, and is constantly changing.

It’s not worth learning to do your own dentistry. It’s not worth learning to do your own surgery. It’s not worth learning to do your own SEO.

As for backlinking, the people who actually attempt it generally get a link from someone else by also linking to them. This is not all that helpful as it is called a reciprocal link. It won’t hurt you, but it won’t help you anywhere as much as if you only had them linking to you. How do you do this? Remember when I said it takes large amounts of resources that take months/years to build? That’s what I mean.

I know. Tampa business owners try to do this is because they are new and don’t have funds or a business reputations yet. My recommendation is to network. Go to BNIs and your local chamber of commerce. Get a few clients under your belt and then you can afford a real SEO company.

It’s better that you have some experience servicing your clients anyway. You need to iron out the kinks in your business’ fulfillment before you start throwing traffic at it. Make sure the person answering the phone is professional. Do you have your appointment systems set up and tested and running well? Check all these boxes for the functioning of your business before you get Tampa SEO. If you get a good company, then you know you’re going to get traffic. It’s better if you are prepared to capitalize on that traffic. You don’t want to be spending thousands of dollars on SEO services and not get an ROI because you don’t have your ducks in a row.

Some people have been burned in the past by newbie SEOs who don’t really know what they are doing. They get mixed results because they have some knowledge, but as soon as they run into something competitive or are going up against a more experienced SEO in Tampa, they discover that they have reached the limitations of their skill set. Then they start saying things like “you can’t guarantee page one rankings” which is just not true. I suppose they can’t guarantee it, but a good SEO agency will guarantee page one.