DIY SEO: what you achieve with 2 hours a week, and what to automate

Doing SEO yourself works fine. For a site of up to a hundred pages you need free tools, half a day to get the basics right and then two hours a week. You do not need training for it. You do need to know what to do first, and you need to keep it up. That second point is where most business owners drop out.

We sell SEO ourselves, through our agency and through GreatCompany. Still, our advice to many small business owners is: start yourself. You get to know your own site, and afterwards you know better what to expect from an agency or a tool.

What you can do yourself, and what not

Part	Doable yourself?	Time
Registering your site with Google	Yes	Half an hour, once
Writing titles and descriptions	Yes	Ten minutes per page
Creating a page per service	Yes	One to two hours per page
Adding internal links	Yes	Five minutes per link
Keeping up your Google Business Profile	Yes	Fifteen minutes a week
Collecting reviews	Yes	Ask every customer
Writing blog posts	Yes, if you enjoy it	Two to four hours per article
Improving speed	Partly	Images yes, the rest through your web developer
Moving a site	No	Have a specialist look
Getting links from other sites	Partly	Your own network yes, campaigns no

The first six rows together are most of what a small site needs.

The start: half a day for the basics

Do this once and do it well. Then you do not need to look at it again.

Register your site in Google Search Console. Free. Afterwards you see which keywords you are shown for and how often people click.

Check that Google may read your site. In WordPress under Settings, Reading. The search engine visibility box must be unchecked.

Install one SEO plugin if you run WordPress. The free version of Yoast or Rank Math is enough. Which one fits you is in the best WordPress SEO plugins.

Fill in your Google Business Profile completely. Category, services, service area, opening hours, photos.

Make a list of your ten most important pages. That is where you start. The rest comes later. A full check of your site is the steps in SEO audit.

Is your site not found at all? First go through the steps in getting your website found on Google.

The weekly rhythm: 2 hours, four blocks

This rhythm fits in two hours. Put it at a fixed time in your calendar. Monday morning works well: you start the week with it.

Block 1: look (20 minutes)

Open Search Console, Performance report, last 28 days. Turn on the comparison with the 28 days before.

You are looking for one thing: a page with many impressions and few clicks, at position 5 to 15. That page is seen but not chosen. That is your fastest gain.

Block 2: improve one page (40 minutes)

Take that page and do three things.

Rewrite the title. Put the search query up front and add your city. Stay under 60 characters. The rules are in the article on the SEO title.

Rewrite the meta description. Say what the visitor gets and end with a reason to click. Examples by industry are in meta description.

Read the first paragraph of the page. Is the answer to the query right there? If not, put it at the top.

Block 3: add two links (20 minutes)

Find two other pages on your site about a related topic. In the text of each, add a link to the page you just improved. Use the search query as the link text. How to do that well is in internal links.

Block 4: notes and reviews (40 minutes)

Write down what you changed, with the date. In four weeks you compare the clicks. Without a note you will not remember what you did.

Use the rest of the time for your Business Profile. Answer new reviews. Post a photo of a job. Send two customers from last week a review request.

What does that bring after three months?

A physical therapy practice in Boise with 30 pages keeps this rhythm for twelve weeks. Then twelve pages are improved, the twelve that are shown most. There are 24 new internal links. The Business Profile has about ten more reviews.

For a local practice that is often enough to move from page 2 to page 1 on the most important queries. No guarantee: Google decides the order. But it is exactly the work an agency would be doing in those three months too. When to expect which effect is in how long SEO takes.

AI as a helper: what it does and does not save

With ChatGPT, block 2 goes faster. Paste the text of your page in and ask for five titles of at most 60 characters with the query up front. Pick the best one and adjust it. That saves ten minutes per page. Prompts that work are in ChatGPT for SEO.

What ChatGPT does not do: choose which page is up next. It does not know your numbers. And it puts nothing on your site. You remain the one who logs in, chooses, copies and pastes. Which assistant is handiest for which job is compared in SEO with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.

Why most business owners stop after six weeks

It almost always goes the same way. Weeks one to three: enthusiastic, it works, the first title brings more clicks. Week four: a busy week, skipped. Week five: skipped again. Week eight: it is still in the calendar, but nobody does it anymore.

The knowledge is still there. The work is just never urgent. There is always a quote that has to go out today.

You then have three choices.

Make it smaller. One page every two weeks is better than nothing. After a year that is still 26 pages.

Hand over the recurring part. Blocks 1, 2 and 3 follow fixed rules. That is exactly the work software can take over. You keep block 4 and your texts. How that works is in automating SEO with AI.

Hire someone. What that costs and what you get for it is in SEO pricing.

Doing it yourself with an assistant that knows your site

There is a middle ground. You do it yourself, but you do not have to search for what needs doing.

With GreatCompany Pro you see per page what needs improving. You ask your SEO assistant which page to tackle this week. You get the page, the reason and the new title and description. You put them on your site yourself. Block 1 and the thinking of block 2 are then already done. See the AI SEO assistant.

On top of that, GreatCompany measures every day whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your business. You cannot keep up with that by hand.

What you never hand over

Even if you automate or outsource everything, three things stay yours.

Your story. Why someone chooses you and not the competitor down the street. No tool or agency can come up with that.

Your facts. Prices, delivery times, service area, warranties. Make sure they are on your site as text and that they are correct.

Your customers. You get reviews by asking for them. Nobody does that for you.

Start with a list of what needs doing on your site

DIY goes fastest when you do not have to search for where to start. Join the waitlist. When we open in the US, your free report shows which errors we find on your site, per page, and whether ChatGPT names you or your competitor. That is your work list for the first weeks.