Should you hire an SEO agency, or do it yourself?

How do you decide in 10 minutes?

We sell SEO and AI search work, so read the rest with that in mind. It is also why the biggest section of this page is the part that costs you nothing. We would rather lose a sale to an owner who did not need us than take a retainer that was never going to pay for itself. Google says the same thing in its own hiring guide:

"If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself." Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?

Question one: how competitive is your city, really? Open an incognito window and search your money query the way a patient would: "dentist near me", "invisalign [your city]", "gym [your suburb]". Count three things. How many paid ads sit above the map, how many of the top three in the map pack have more than 200 reviews, and how many first-page results are national platforms rather than local businesses. Roughly zero ads, competitors under 100 reviews and mostly local sites means a market you can win yourself. Four stacked ads and three competitors past 400 reviews means effort alone will not clear it.

Question two: how many hours will you actually protect? Not "how many could I find in a good week". Open your calendar and block a recurring slot now, for the next three months. If you cannot put it in the calendar today, you do not have the hours, and paying someone is not a failure of discipline. It is a correct read on your own schedule.

What can you do yourself, for free?

This is the long section on purpose. Almost all of the return in local search comes from six things, none of which require an agency, a tool subscription or technical skill. They require somebody in the practice to own them and keep going.

1. Fill your Google Business Profile to 100%

If you only do one thing, this is it. Google's own guidance is blunt about why: "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results." Most profiles we look at are 60% filled and have not been touched since somebody claimed them.

Go through the whole thing in one sitting, roughly 90 minutes:

• Primary category. Pick the most specific one that matches your main revenue, then add the secondary categories for the rest. A practice that makes most of its money on implants and lists itself only as "Dentist" is competing in the wrong race.
• Every service, listed individually. Not a paragraph. Individual service entries with a plain description each, in the words patients use ("teeth whitening", not "aesthetic dentition protocols").
• Hours, including holiday and special hours. Google lists special hours explicitly among the details to keep current. Wrong hours cost you the patient and the trust in one go.
• Attributes and practical details. Parking, wheelchair access, languages spoken, whether you take walk-ins. Google names parking and Wi-Fi type details as things to add.
• Real photos, replaced quarterly. Exterior from the street so people find the door, reception, treatment rooms, the team. Not stock.
• The Q&A section, seeded by you. Post the ten questions your front desk answers every day, then answer them from the business account. Do you take my insurance? Do you see emergencies today? What does a first visit cost? Google lists responding to reviews and keeping details complete as part of the same job.

Then put a recurring 20-minute slot in the calendar every month to check nothing has drifted and to answer new questions. Profiles rot quietly.

2. Build a review habit, not a review campaign

Reviews are the strongest thing you control that also feeds AI answers, because assistants read review text and not just star counts. A review that mentions "implant" and names your neighborhood gives a machine something to work with. Five stars and no words gives it nothing.

The system that works is boring and specific. One person owns it. The ask happens at the peak of relief, not at checkout: the appointment where the pain stopped, the day the aligners come off, the session where the member hit their first milestone. Ask in person, then send the link within the hour.

Reply to every review, good and bad, in a sentence or two that names the treatment and the place. That is accurate text tying your business to what you do, written by you, on a page Google and AI assistants both read.

One hard line: never pay for reviews and never trade a discount for one. Google's content policy prohibits content posted "due to an incentive offered by a business - such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services", and states that "Fake engagement is not allowed and will be removed." Beyond the rules, incentivized reviews read as fake to patients, which for a clinic is a reputation risk no ranking is worth.

3. Write your treatment pages around what patients actually ask

One page per money service: implants, aligners, emergency visits, memberships, injectables. Not one "Services" page listing twelve things in a sentence each. The mistake owners make is writing what they wish patients cared about. Write what patients ask instead, and you do not have to guess what that is:

• Your front desk. Keep a notepad by the phone for two weeks and write down every question asked before booking. That list is your outline. It is better research than any keyword tool sells.
• Your own reviews and Q&A. The words patients use for their own problem, already written down.
• Google's own suggestions. Type your service into Google and read the autocomplete, then scroll to "People also ask". Free, and it is Google telling you the questions.

Then structure each page so the answer is impossible to miss:

• Answer the money question in the first 60 to 80 words. What it costs in your city as an honest range, how long it takes, who is a candidate. Do not make anyone scroll for it.
• Use the patient's question as the heading. "Does an implant hurt?" beats "Procedure overview".
• Short, self-contained paragraphs. Anything worth quoting should make sense lifted out on its own.
• A visible date and a named author with credentials. For health content this is not decoration, it is the difference between a page a machine trusts and one it skips.
• Prices as ranges, with what changes the number. Owners resist this. Patients search for it anyway, and the practice that answers gets the call.

Two pages written properly beat twelve thin ones. Write one this month and one next month.

4. Put hours, prices and address in plain text, not images

An afternoon, and it gets skipped constantly. A price list saved as a JPEG, opening hours baked into a graphic, a PDF menu of services, an address that only lives inside your header logo: crawlers and AI assistants read the HTML text of a page, so what sits inside the pixels is invisible to them, and to screen readers too.

The check takes 30 seconds per page. Open your site, press Cmd+F (Ctrl+F on Windows) and search for your phone number, your street name and a price. If the browser cannot find them, neither can a machine. Retype the content as real text. Keep the image if you like it, put the text underneath.

Same principle for your name, address and phone: one exact string, character for character, on your site, your Business Profile and every directory. "Smith Family Dental" in one place and "Smith Dental Care" in another is two half-strength businesses to a machine.

5. Claim the basic directories, once

Ninety minutes, then leave it alone. Your Google Business Profile first, then Bing Places, Apple Business Connect (this is what feeds Apple Maps, and it is regularly the most neglected one), Yelp, Facebook, and the two or three directories that matter for your field: the health and insurance directories for a clinic, the class and booking platforms for a gym or studio. Paste the identical NAP string into each. Ignore anyone selling you a package of 200 citations. The long tail of junk directories does close to nothing.

6. Check your own visibility with a prompt panel

Owners skip this because it feels technical. It is not. Write down the ten to fifteen questions a real patient would ask, put them into Google and ChatGPT three runs each, and log who gets named. Freeze the list on day one and never edit it, because editing the panel to flatter the results is the oldest trick in reporting.

Three runs, not one, because these answers are probabilistic. In our own tracking (July 2026), a panel of 15 buying prompts across dental, gym and med spa searches, run three times each, triggered a Google AI Overview in 42 of 45 runs, while one prompt never triggered one in any of its three runs. Reddit threads were cited in 27 of those 45 runs. A single screenshot proves nothing, in your hands or an agency's. Step by step: how to track if ChatGPT recommends your business.

How many hours does this really take?

Honest numbers, from doing the work ourselves rather than a survey. Month one is heavy because it is setup: roughly 12 to 20 hours to complete the profile, claim the directories, build the review habit and write your first two service pages. After that it settles down to about 3 to 6 hours a month: reviews and replies weekly, one page written or refreshed, one monthly visibility check.

Those hours are not free, they are unbilled. Work out your own number: monthly revenue divided by the hours you personally work is what an hour of yours is worth on paper. Then ask the sharper question. Do these hours come out of clinical time or out of your evenings? If writing a service page displaces a chair hour, DIY is expensive. If it displaces an hour of scrolling after dinner, it is close to free. And an owner who has done this once is very hard to sell to afterwards, which is a return you keep either way.

Task by task: do it yourself or pay for it?

Market rates in the table come from two surveys of practitioners: Ahrefs polled 439 SEO providers (updated August 2024) and found an average hourly rate of $111, with the $75 to $100 band the most common, agencies averaging $3,209 a month and freelancers $1,348.63. Backlinko's survey of 300-plus professionals (updated December 2025) puts the typical monthly cost at $1,000 to $2,500, hourly consultants at $50 to $100, and agencies about 30% above freelancers. The "cost if you pay" figures below are those hourly bands applied to a realistic number of hours per task, so treat them as estimates rather than quoted prices. For dental specifically, the full breakdown with sources is in our guide to what dental SEO costs in 2026.

Time estimates are our own, from doing this work. Dollar figures are derived from the two surveys linked above, not quotes for a specific scope.

When does hiring actually make sense?

Four situations. If none of them describe you, keep your money.

• The competition genuinely outclasses effort. Dense metro, competitors with hundreds of reviews and years of content, high-ticket services people research for weeks. Implants, med spa treatments and premium memberships sit here. You can do everything right and still be sixth, because everyone above you did it too and started earlier.
• Multiple locations. The complexity is not linear: separate profiles, location pages that are not copies of each other, review streams per site, one wrong address propagating across directories. This is where DIY stops scaling.
• The hours do not exist. If the calendar block has been moved three months running, it is not going to happen. Buying the execution is the honest fix.
• You did the work and it did not move. Three to six months of real effort against a frozen baseline, and calls, direction requests and bookings are flat. That is diagnostic information worth paying someone to read, and it is the best moment to hire, because you can now tell in one conversation whether they know more than you do.

When should you not hire yet?

Bluntly, because this is where most wasted retainers start. There are two versions of "not yet" and they sit on opposite sides of the same line. A retainer only earns its keep once the free work is finished and has stopped being enough. Before that line you are paying someone to work around a problem you could fix for nothing; past it you are paying for work that is already done.

Too early, because the free work is unfinished:

• Your Business Profile is still incomplete. Paying $2,000 a month while your profile is missing services and hours is paying someone to push a car with the handbrake on. Do the free hour first.
• You have fewer than 25 reviews. Nothing an agency does in month one beats asking your existing happy patients. Start there, it costs nothing.
• Your website is broken or nonexistent. SEO on a site that loads badly or cannot be edited is money poured into a bucket with a hole. Fix the foundation first, which is a separate business of ours precisely because it is a separate problem.
• Your budget is $500 a month. At Ahrefs' average of $111 an hour, $500 buys four or five hours and a chunk goes to reporting. You will get a template. Do the free work and come back when you can fund a real engagement.
• You cannot describe what a win looks like. "More visibility" is not a target. New patient calls per month, booked appointments from search, cost per new patient. Without one of those, no report can tell you whether the money worked.

Not needed, because the free work is done and still enough: one location in a market without much competition, a profile you keep complete, reviews coming in steadily and answered, a calendar that fills itself, and your own name coming back when you test your money prompts in ChatGPT and Google. Nothing on that list is worth outsourcing while it keeps working. Test it again in six months, or the day one of those stops being true.

How do you spot an agency that will disappoint you?

Google publishes a warning worth reading before any sales call, and it has not needed updating in years:

"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?

The same page tells you to "beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a 'special relationship' with Google, or advertise a 'priority submit' to Google", and to "be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do". Those two sentences filter out a lot of the market by themselves. Three more we treat as disqualifying: a proposal with no baseline in it, reporting built on impressions and rankings for keywords nobody buys on, and a refusal to say who does the work.

Then five questions, in writing, aimed at the situation you are actually in: you have done some of this yourself and you want to know what you are buying on top.

1. Will you freeze a baseline before you touch anything? Current rankings and current AI answers for an agreed list of prompts, exported and dated before work starts. Without it, every future report picks its own comparison point.
2. How exactly will you measure this? A fixed set of prompts, repeated to a schedule on every engine they claim to cover, with the result expressed as how often you got named out of all the runs, sitting next to calls and booked appointments. Not screenshots, and not a proprietary score they will not explain.
3. Who does the work? Name and role. Founder-led shops sell you the founder and deliver a junior, big shops rotate accounts. Neither is disqualifying if they say it up front.
4. What happens if it does not work? A scheduled review against that baseline and a real decision: continue, adjust or stop. Ours: on Growth plans and above, cited in 90 days measured against your frozen prompt panel, or we keep working free.
5. Who owns what you build? Domain, hosting, website, content, Business Profile, Analytics and Search Console properties and any tracking numbers, all in your name, with the agency added as a user. This matters most when you have already built some of it yourself. A proposal that quietly moves your profile or site under agency ownership is a lock-in clause dressed as a service.

That is the whole checklist, and it works on any shop selling search work, ours included. If the pitch specifically involves AI search, two more belong on the end of it: which engines they track and why those, and whether they also work with your competitors down the road. Both are covered, with the good and bad answers, in GEO agency vs SEO agency, which is also the place to go if you are weighing a specialist against the general SEO firm you already pay. If you would rather see the answers already filled in for named shops, we scored the market against these same criteria in our comparison of GEO agencies for local businesses.

What we charge, and why it is on a public page

We publish prices because hidden pricing exists to make comparison hard. Ours: a deep audit at $1,500 that credits 100% toward your first month, then Foundation at $1,500/month, Growth at $2,500/month and Dominate at $5,000/month. Full detail is on the pricing page, and the clinic version is on our page for dental practices. Against the surveys above, Foundation sits near the agency average and Growth sits above it. That is deliberate, and if the free work on this page is enough for your market, you should not be paying either number. Two things we do differently: on Growth and up the guarantee is measurement-shaped rather than ranking-shaped, and we take one business per city, because an AI answer names one or two businesses and selling the same city twice would be selling the same seat twice.

Either way, start with the free work. If you run it for three months and your calendar fills, that is the best outcome on this page. If you run it and hit a ceiling, you will hire from a much stronger position, and the free GEO score will tell you where the ceiling is before you spend anything.