How to do SEO yourself: a week-by-week plan for the owner of a small site

What one owner can move alone, and what stays out of reach

An owner who types how to do SEO yourself into a search box wants one thing settled first: is it realistic. Google answers on its own page about hiring an SEO: a person who runs a small local business can probably do much of the work alone, starting from the SEO Starter Guide. The work is ordinary. Get the site indexed, give each service a clear page, write honest titles and make it readable on a phone.

What stays out of reach is the order of results. The starter guide says there are no secrets that automatically rank a site first, and that Google guarantees no site a place in its index. The plan below takes a few evenings in each of the first four weeks and about an hour a week afterwards. It is an order of work, not a promise of positions.

Week one: Search Console, Yandex Webmaster and two reports worth reading

Start with the instruments. Search Console Help describes Google Search Console as a free service for monitoring a site's presence in Google Search: you add the site, prove it is yours, and data begins to appear within a few days. Yandex Webmaster does the same for Yandex, which matters when customers search in Russian. Its own page calls the service free, with paid extended functions for some instruments. It checks pages automatically and reports missing meta tags, error pages and poor display on mobile devices.

Read two reports this week. The first is indexing. The starter guide gives the quickest test: search for site: followed by your domain, and if results point to your pages, you are in the index. The second is queries: which searches already show your site and how often people click. Copy ten of them into a note as your starting line.

Week two: one page for one need, with a title written for the searcher

List what customers come for, one line per need, and check that each line has its own page. Boiler repair and bathroom fitting are typed by different people on different days, and one page called Services answers neither well. Write in the customer's words. The starter guide notes that a beginner and an expert may search for the same thing in different terms.

Then the title, the line people see in results. The starter guide asks for one that is unique to the page, clear, concise and accurate about its contents: the service, the place and one distinguishing detail. Under it sits the snippet, which Google's snippet documentation says is created primarily from the page content. The guide also names things not worth your evenings: Google Search ignores the keywords meta tag, and there is no magic word count.

Week three: the technical minimum a non-programmer can check

Begin with the phone. Google's documentation on mobile-first indexing says it uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with a smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. Open each main page on your own phone and check that the text reads without zooming and the button is within reach. The same documentation recommends responsive design as the easiest pattern to maintain.

Next, make sure nothing is closed by accident. A robots.txt file tells crawlers which addresses they may access. Google's documentation says it is not a way to keep a page out of search; for that it names noindex or a password. A block left over from development sometimes outlives the launch. In the Page indexing report, look for pages blocked by robots.txt, marked noindex or not found.

Last, the addresses and the sitemap. The starter guide prefers words in a URL that are useful to a reader over random identifiers. A sitemap is a file that tells a search engine about the pages of a site, and Google's sitemap documentation is frank: with about 500 pages or fewer, all reachable by links from the home page, you may not need one. If your platform produces the file, submit it in Search Console and check it in Yandex Webmaster. It is no guarantee, the documentation warns, that every listed page will be indexed.

From week four on: pages that answer what customers really ask

From the fourth week the work becomes a habit: one useful page added or one weak page improved each week. Topics come from phone calls, chats and reviews, wherever customers repeat the same questions. Google's guidance on helpful content says its ranking systems are designed to prioritise helpful, reliable information created to benefit people. It suggests asking whether the page gives original information and whether you would recommend it to a friend.

For a small business, original means what only you know. Prices, or at least what the price depends on. Photographs of real jobs, the guarantee in writing, the cases a customer allowed you to show. The same guidance warns against writing to a word count, noting that Google has no preferred length, and against producing content on many topics in the hope that some of it ranks.

Links and mentions earned honestly: maps, directories, partners, your own profiles

The starter guide says Google finds pages mainly through links from pages it has already crawled. For a small business the first links come from places where a company is listed anyway: the map, a trade directory people really use, a supplier's partner page, your own profiles. Google Business Profile Help says complete and accurate profiles are more likely to appear in local results. It adds that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

Bought links are another matter. Google's spam policies define link spam as creating links mainly to manipulate rankings. Their examples include buying or selling links for ranking purposes, exchanging goods or services for links and links from low-quality directories. A site that breaks the policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all.

Yandex has said the same in its own words. On 15 May 2015 the Yandex blog for webmasters announced the Minusinsk algorithm against link spam: sites that use SEO links may rank lower, and search traffic could fall for up to several months. The post advised giving such links up and working on the quality of the site. Rules like these are revised, so read the current help before deciding anything.

Reading the first three months: impressions arrive before clicks

The Performance report in Search Console shows four numbers, and its help defines each. Clicks are the times a user came to your site from the results. Impressions are the times the site appeared there. CTR is clicks divided by impressions. Average position, in the chart, follows the topmost result from your site. A page must be shown before it can be clicked, so on a young site the impressions line moves first.

Positions will jump, and that is normal. The same help explains that results depend on the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching, so looking yourself up tells you little. Google's guide to debugging drops in search traffic says positions are not static and treats a move from position 2 to 4 as a small drop. Give each change time: the starter guide says some take effect in a few hours and others in several months.

Where doing it alone stops paying, and what to prepare before handing it over

There are honest signs that the solo stage is over. The indexing report shows errors you cannot read. The site needs a redesign or a move to another platform. Google's page on hiring an SEO lists what a specialist may take on: a review of content and structure, technical advice, keyword research. It calls a planned redesign a great moment to hire, the earlier the better, and warns that no one can guarantee first place on Google.

Prepare before you talk to anyone. Open access to Search Console and Yandex Webmaster with at least three months of data. Bring the list of needs and pages from week two, the questions customers ask, and a note of what you changed and when. Studios such as VITON13 Studio do this work, and a prepared owner gets a more exact scope from any of them. The question of how to do SEO yourself then shrinks to which part to keep. A sensible split leaves the content with you, because you know the trade.