We are an SEO agency, and this article tells you when not to hire us. Taking work we cannot genuinely help with costs you money and costs us our reputation. The deciding factor is not whether you "know enough" — it is what a customer is worth and what your own hours are worth.
Here is the arithmetic, the list of what you can do yourself today, and the point at which hiring starts to make sense.
Most people decide this on a feeling — "too expensive" or "we wouldn't know how" — when it is a sum. Put your own numbers in.
Value of one customer × extra customers per month = what SEO is worth to you
If that figure is less than three times the fee, wait. SEO takes six to nine months to pay out fully, and you need enough margin to sit through that without pain.
Worked example: a customer worth ฿30,000, five extra per month, is ฿150,000 a month. Against a ฿150,000 fee that is a ratio of one. Not enough — wait until the market is larger or the customer value higher.
The term people leave out is their own time. Twelve hours a month, at an hour you could otherwise spend selling for ฿3,000, is ฿36,000 of hidden cost. It never appears in the accounts and it is entirely real.
The site is small and nothing has been done yet. No Search Console, never checked whether key pages are indexed — this groundwork has an enormous return per hour and needs nobody. Hiring now is paying someone for an afternoon's work you could do.
A customer is worth under ฿5,000. Low-ticket businesses need volume, which SEO delivers slowly. Early on, other channels usually pay back faster.
Someone on the team is actually interested. SEO is learnable, and people inside the business know its customers better than any agency will. A motivated in-house learner routinely beats a cheap agency.
You are not yet sure the demand exists. If you do not know how many people search for what you sell, test with ads first — cheaper, and it answers in two weeks rather than six months.
| Task | Time | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Set up Google Search Console | 30 min | The only tool that shows how Google sees the site |
| Check key pages are indexed | 1 hour | An unindexed page does not exist as far as Google is concerned |
| Rewrite titles around real queries | 2–4 hours | The fastest-acting on-page work there is |
| Compress every image | 2–3 hours | The most common cause of a slow site and the easiest fix |
| Add basic schema | 1 hour | Our free generator produces the code |
| Register a Business Profile | 1 hour | For local businesses, the highest return on time available |
Do all six, then wait two months. If rankings move, keep going yourself. If nothing moves despite doing everything, that is the signal the problem sits deeper than general tools can see.
You did everything you know and nothing moved. The clearest signal there is. What remains is usually crawl budget, JavaScript rendering or internal link structure — visible only by reading log files.
The site passes a few thousand pages. At that size the problem changes kind: from making each page good to governing which pages Google should spend its time on. A different skill entirely.
Rankings dropped suddenly and you do not know why. It could be an algorithm update, a technical fault just introduced, or the residue of past grey hat work. Guessing wrong costs months.
Your time is worth more than the fee. Once the business is large enough that you should be with customers and staff rather than in Search Console, hiring is not a cost — it is buying hours back.
Pay once to find out what is genuinely wrong, then have your own team work the list. It suits businesses that can change code but do not know what to change, and it costs a fraction of a retainer while still pointing in the right direction.
Let a specialist handle the technical layer, where mistakes are expensive to undo, and write the content yourself because you know the customers and the product. This routinely produces better content than outsourcing the writing as well.
The basics, yes. Setting up Search Console, writing titles that match real searches, compressing images and adding schema are all doable with free tools in a few hours. What is genuinely hard is reading log files, diagnosing JavaScript rendering failures, and structuring large sites — those need experience more than effort.
Roughly 20–30 hours for the initial audit and fixes, then 8–15 hours a month if you are also writing the content. The part people leave out is that these are the owner's hours, which are usually worth more than they assume. Ask what the same hours spent directly on selling would return.
As a rough rule: if a customer is worth under ฿5,000 and you need only a handful a month, doing it yourself usually wins. If a customer is worth tens of thousands, or you are competing on terms several agencies already work, hiring starts to pay. We decline retainers below ฿100,000 a month for the same reason.
Often, yes. A genuinely good freelancer beats a mid-size agency that hands your account to a junior. The caveat is that one person is usually strong in one direction — excellent at content but unable to fix technical issues, or the reverse. Ask directly what they do themselves and what they subcontract.
Yes, and it is arguably the best sequence. Having done it yourself, you can tell whether an agency is describing real work or selling a story, and you know which questions to ask. The clients we work with most easily are the ones who did it themselves first and hit a ceiling.
Two things at minimum. First, the business knowledge — who the customers are and which terms actually close, because no agency can know that better than you. Second, someone empowered to approve changes. Engagements that stall usually stall because nobody on the client side can sign off on the fixes.
Send a URL. We send back a one-page diagnostic and tell you whether your problem is the kind you can handle yourself. Free, no obligation. If we think you can do it yourself, we will say so and pitch you nothing.
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