My answer is an agency for the setup and ongoing oversight, with your own people doing the monthly hours, unless someone inside has the knowledge, protected hours and judgement to run it all.
The basics of Local SEO can be learned, but which tasks matter for your business is hard to see from inside it.
There are two exceptions: DIY, where the owner or existing staff fit the work in, and in-house, where a role has Local SEO written into it.
What Local SEO work involves, task by task
Local SEO work comes down to five defined jobs that a capable business can learn, some running every month and some only when something about the business changes.
Your Google Business Profile, the listing Google shows for you in Maps and search, needs its fields, posts and photos kept current every month. Reviews run on their own clock: ask every customer for one, and reply to every one that arrives.
Citations, the directories and other websites that list your business, need building on the sources that count and correcting wherever one has your name, address or phone number wrong. Keeping those details straight everywhere is NAP consistency in Local SEO, checked every few months and straight away whenever your details change.
Structured data, the code on your website that states your business details to Google, has to stay true as the business changes. Last comes a monthly report against the baseline you set at the start.
In my experience it adds up to a few hours a month once the setup is done. Those hours have to keep happening for years.
- Write the jobs down as a monthly job description, with hours against each.
- Mark which ones nobody in the business knows how to do yet.
- Name who would still be doing them in month nine.
How to judge a Local SEO agency before you hire one
Judge a Local SEO agency by whether it audits your business before it recommends anything, then decides what you should be visible for and closes the gaps in priority order, starting with relevance.
After that it should manage or oversee the ongoing work, and each month report against the Local SEO baselines it recorded at the start, in a Local SEO report that shows what moved.
The engagements I’ve seen go wrong in 20+ years of Local SEO had skipped that diagnosis, and the work never fitted the business. Walk away from any proposal that arrives before anyone has looked at yours.
Belmore Digital’s Local SEO work follows the same order.
- Ask what their audit covers and what it found for a previous client.
- Ask what the baselines will be and how the monthly report will show movement against them.
- Keep ownership of your Google Business Profile and add the agency as a manager.
Splitting local search work between an agency and your own team
The split I’d recommend gives the agency the setup and the ongoing oversight of your local search work, and gives your own team the monthly hours.
Setup is where the judgement calls sit. Someone has to decide which category fits, which service area to set and which inconsistencies are costing you. Local SEO competitor research adds what the businesses above you are doing that you could match.
Those calls are hard to make well without having made them for other businesses first.
I’ve seen a setup done wrong leave every month of work after it building on the wrong base. The posts go up and the reviews come in, and the position barely moves because the category or the service area was off from day one.
Oversight is the second half of the agency’s job. Someone reads the monthly numbers and knows which movement matters and which is noise. They notice what Google has changed or what a competitor has started doing, and they adjust the plan. In my experience that takes a few hours of their time each month.
Your own team keeps the hands-on work of posting, replying to reviews and checking listings. They know the business and they’re already there. Those tasks suit the people who answer the phone.
- Separate the setup, the monthly hours and the judgement about what to do with them.
- Decide which of the three the business can supply.
- Bring in outside help for any it can’t.
When DIY Local SEO works, and where it breaks
DIY Local SEO, the first exception, works when the owner or existing staff have real digital marketing knowledge, protected hours every month and the patience to get through the initial learning.
I’ve seen it done well. The version that works is the sole trader who treats the profile as part of running the business, in the same way they treat the invoicing and the quotes.
It breaks in three ways, in my experience. The first is a busy stretch. The Local SEO work is what slips when the phone is ringing, and nobody notices until the profile has sat untouched for a season.
The second is the checklist, and it catches capable people. A Local SEO checklist lists the tasks, but it can’t rank them for your particular business. It can’t tell you which of several plausible categories fits what you do. It won’t spot the directory still showing your old phone number, and it can’t see what the competitors outranking you have that you don’t.
So the owner works through everything, sees little move and concludes that Local SEO doesn’t work. In the cases I’ve seen, the effort was real and went into the tasks that mattered least for that business.
The third is growth. A second location, a new service or a wider area turns a manageable job into a much bigger one. It tends to arrive when the owner has the least time to spare.
- Test the plan against the three breaks before choosing DIY.
- Book the monthly tasks in the calendar as appointments.
- Have the initial audit done properly even if you run everything after it.
In-house local search needs a named person with protected hours
In-house local search, the second exception, works when a marketing manager or digital coordinator has Local SEO written into their role, with protected hours and a monthly report to deliver.
Set up that way, it has an edge no agency can match. That person knows the business, its customers and its quiet months from the inside.
It breaks in two ways, and I’ve watched both.
The one I see most is Local SEO arriving as one more item for a general marketer who is already running the website, the social channels, the email and the events. It gets whatever attention is left over once those are done. In practice that looks like a burst of updates when someone notices the profile has gone stale, followed by months of silence.
Nobody decided to neglect it. The events had dates on them and the profile didn’t.
The second is quieter. A capable generalist works through the checklist carefully and then stops, because from where they sit the job looks finished. Knowing what the checklist leaves out comes from audit experience, and a generalist who hasn’t done audit work has had no chance to build it.
- Write Local SEO into a role, with hours and a monthly report.
- Check whether the person has done audit work before; if not, get that part done outside.
- At three months, check that the work is happening, not just that it was assigned.
Three questions that decide who runs your local search work
If any of these three questions gets a no, bring in an agency for the setup and oversight of your local search work. Three yeses make you one of the exceptions, and DIY or in-house can run it once the audit has been done properly.
Knowledge. Has someone in the business done this work before, or learned it properly?
Protected hours. Will those hours survive a busy month, every month, for years?
Judgement. Can someone inside the business tell which tasks matter for it and read what the results say?
Local SEO setup and oversight from Belmore Digital is there for the businesses that answer no. Still deciding whether to invest at all? The business case for Local SEO comes first, and Local SEO against paid local advertising covers that choice if ads are still on the table.
- Answer the three questions in writing, and have a second person in the business answer them too.
- Where the answers differ, go with the more cautious one.
- Decide, put a review date on it, and revisit when the business changes.
FAQ
Should I do Local SEO myself? You can, if you have real digital marketing knowledge, a few hours every month that survive busy periods and the judgement to tell which tasks matter for your business. Without that judgement, have the setup and ongoing oversight done by someone experienced, and run the monthly work yourself.
What does a Local SEO agency do? A good Local SEO agency audits the business first, decides what it should be visible for and closes the gaps in priority order, starting with the business category and description. It then manages or oversees the ongoing work and reports every month against the baseline it set before any changes were made.
How many hours a month does Local SEO take? In my experience an established profile in good order needs a few hours a month. The setup at the start is a much larger block of work. Extra locations or a wider service area add to the monthly figure.
Should an agency own my Google Business Profile? Keep ownership of your Google Business Profile and add the agency as a manager. Google gives managers the same access as owners apart from adding or removing users and removing the profile. The agency can do the work, and you keep control.
TL;DR
- Use an agency for the setup and oversight, with your own people doing the monthly hours, unless someone inside has the knowledge, protected hours and judgement to run it all.
- The work is five learnable jobs that have to keep happening for years.
- A good agency audits first, sets a baseline and reports against it. Keep ownership of your profile.
- The sensible split puts the agency on the setup and the monthly reading of results, and your team on the hours.
- DIY is the first exception. It works with knowledge and protected time, and breaks through a busy stretch, a checklist that can’t rank tasks, and growth.
- In-house is the second. It works as a written part of a role, and breaks as one more item on a general marketer’s list.
- Three questions decide it, one each for knowledge, hours and judgement. Any no means an agency.
If you want to talk through what Local SEO would look like for your business and what resource it would actually require, talk to JB.
