Can I Do SEO Myself? A Weekend Plan for Texas Small Business Owners

Yes. A Texas small business owner can do a good share of their own SEO, and the most useful part fits in one weekend: get your Google Business Profile right, clean up your listings, ask for reviews, and fix the home page and service pages so they say what you do and where. What's hard to do yourself is the work that needs steady volume and specialist judgment: links, technical repairs and content every week. Here's the weekend, then what to keep up and what to hand off.

Before Saturday: gather these

• Your business name exactly as it appears on your sign, truck and invoices
• Your address (or the towns you serve, if customers don't come to you), phone and hours
• Your main services, in the words customers use on the phone
• 15 to 20 recent photos from your phone: finished work, the crew, vehicles, the storefront
• Logins for your website and for the Google account that owns your profile

Saturday: your listings and reviews

Morning: the Google Business Profile

Find your business on Google Maps. If there's no profile, create one. If there is, claim it or get access from whoever set it up. Then go field by field:

1. Name: exactly the name on your sign. Adding keywords or a city ("Smith Plumbing Round Rock Water Heaters") breaks Google's guidelines and can get the profile suspended.
2. Primary category: the one closest to the work that brings in most of your money. Add secondary categories only for services you actually provide.
3. Address or service area: if customers come to you, show the address. If you go to them, you can hide the address and list the towns you serve, up to 20.
4. Hours, phone and website link, pointed at the page that fits best (usually the home page).
5. Services and description: plain sentences about what you do and where. Not a pile of keywords.
6. Photos: upload the real ones you gathered.

If a setting looks different from what you expected, Google's Business Profile help center explains each one.

Afternoon: name, address and phone everywhere else

Search your business name plus your city and go through the first two pages of results. Then check Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, Facebook and the directories that matter in your trade, such as Angi or Houzz for home services, Avvo for lawyers and Healthgrades for doctors.

Hunt for old addresses, old phone numbers and old business names first. If you moved from Pflugerville to Hutto three years ago and half your listings still show Pflugerville, that's the fix that matters. Small formatting differences like "Ste" versus "Suite" matter far less than wrong information.

Keep a simple spreadsheet as you go: the site, the listing's URL, the login and what you changed. You'll need it the next time you move or change your number.

Late afternoon: five reviews

Ask your five most recent customers, not your five happiest. Asking only the customers you expect to be pleased is review gating, which breaks Google's policies, and so does offering a discount or anything else in return for a review. Copy the direct review link from your Business Profile and send a short text:

"Hi Maria, thanks for having us out on Tuesday. If you have a minute, a Google review helps us a lot: [link]. Either way, thank you for your business."

Then reply to every review on the profile, old and new, with a sentence that's specific to the job.

Sunday: your website

Morning: the home page title and H1

The page title is the blue headline people see in search results. The H1 is the main heading on the page itself. Both should say what you do and where, in plain words:

• Title: "Plumber in Round Rock and Georgetown | Smith Plumbing"
• H1: "Plumbing repair and water heaters in Round Rock and Georgetown"

Most site builders have an SEO settings box on each page where you can change the title. Save the clever slogan for the paragraph under the H1.

Midday: one page per main service

If your home page lists eight services in a bullet list and none of them links anywhere, that's the biggest fix on the site. Write a page for each of the three to five services that bring in the most money. Each page should say what's included, where you do it, roughly how long it takes and what affects the price (you don't have to publish prices you'd rather quote). Add a few photos from real jobs and answers to the questions customers ask on the phone. The title and H1 follow the same pattern: service, then city.

Afternoon: photos and mobile speed

Replace stock photos with your own, and resize them before uploading. A photo straight off a phone is usually far bigger than a web page needs. Then run your home page through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile results. Oversized images, sliders and heavy plugins are the usual problems on small business sites, and images are the one you can fix yourself today.

Last, pick up your phone and act like a customer. Open the site, tap the phone number, fill in the contact form. If any of that fails, it comes before everything else in this post.

If you have an hour left: Search Console

Set up Google Search Console for your site and verify that you own it. It's free, and it shows which searches you appear for and which pages get clicks. Useful data builds up over the following weeks, so starting this weekend pays off next month.

What to keep doing every month

• Ask every customer for a review, and reply to every review.
• Add new photos to your Business Profile.
• Post a short update on the profile: a recent job, a seasonal reminder, a change in hours.
• Improve one service page or add one new page.
• Open Search Console and note which searches bring impressions and which pages get clicks.
• Check your profile for changes you didn't make. Other people can suggest edits to a listing, and some get applied.

An hour or two a month keeps the weekend's work from going stale.

What's worth hiring out

Some jobs reward experience and steady hours more than a free weekend.

Links from other websites take outreach, patience and judgment about which sites are worth it, and low-quality links can do more harm than good. Technical fixes, such as redirects after a redesign, indexing problems, structured data and speed problems beyond images, are easy to get wrong in ways you won't see for weeks. Content at volume matters when your market is competitive and one new page a month can't keep pace. And covering towns beyond your own takes planning, because pages for places where you have no work rarely hold up.

For the local side of that work, here's what our local SEO services for Texas businesses cover.

How to check an agency's work

If you do hire someone, keep control and check the work:

• Keep ownership of your domain, website, Business Profile and Search Console. Add the agency as a manager or user, not as the owner.
• Ask for a monthly report that lists every link built, with its live URL, the page it points to and the anchor text. Open a few of them yourself.
• Compare what the report says with your own Search Console data.
• Ask what changed on your site this month, page by page.

After the weekend

Do the two days first and give it a month. If you'd like to know what's still missing after that, run your site through the free SEO audit and compare what comes back with your own list.