The Dangers and Drawbacks to Do-it-Yourself (DIY) SEO

1. Potential You Do Something Wrong, Get Blacklisted by the Search Engines

I can't tell you how many times clients have come to us after this has happened from taking either a DIY approach or hiring an inexperienced firm.  Unfortunately this is a growing problem as due to the growth in SEO, many web development and traditional marketing firms have hired kids fresh out of college, handed them a 3 page "SEO" playbook, and given them their first assignment. Blacklisting due to bad SEO takes a long time to resolve (sometimes as long as a year after removing / undoing the violation), as the search engines (particularly Google) want to see proof that you are not violating their guidelines and don't have the intention to in the future.

2. Diminished Potential Results

I have no doubt that a smart person could spend some time reading around the web, and, provided they didn't take any really bad advice, do a reasonably good job at SEOing the site. They may even make it to the bottom of the first page of Google for certain niche-keywords. However, for the keywords that are going to bring in the most traffic, these are highly competitive and require both expertise and experience in competing  with a professionally-optimized crowd (including not just the on-page factors, but the off-page link building which is much more difficult).  Additionally, a key component of SEO success is selecting the correct keywords to optimize around.  Most “DIYers” select the keywords based on what they think people are searching on, not actual search trend research. This may lead them to decent rankings on terms that are not significantly searched for.

3. Significant Time Requirements

Learning about and then staying up to speed on SEO is a big job. Your may spend 50 hours reading articles online before feeling confident in optimizing your site, and then another few hours each week staying abreast of the latest trends. Changes in the search engine algorithms have been coming even more frequently since the Bing-Yahoo deal was announced, and will only continue as the integration date gets closer and the search market gets more competitive.  Then there's the time spent doing the actual optimization, and the time spent on a monthly basis updating the optimization and gathering links back to your site. The link building is especially crucial to SEO these days, and has an economy of scale that makes doing professional-grade link building on an individual scale not very cost effective when you work out the time your resource would spend getting or procuring relevant, high-quality links. Bad link building is also a key contributor to issue #1 above.

For these reasons, I believe most business owners and marketers are best of working with an experienced and proven SEO firm over attempting to do SEO in-house. This risks are lower, and the results will be better from both a ranking and traffic / conversions perspective.

This article isn't meant as a scare tactic to keep anyone from trying to do their own SEO, however those wishing to experiment with SEO on their own site should have realistic expectations of the risks and what they can accomplish. Unless you have the midas touch or a very niche-market, you are not going to achieve the results you would expect from a professional SEO. Depending on your business needs, time constraints and place within your market, this may be sufficient, or it may not be.

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