Do you need an SEO?

The first surprise in Google’s own documentation is how little it pushes you toward hiring anyone. For a small or local business, Google states plainly that you can probably do much of the work yourself, using the free SEO Starter Guide.

Where it does suggest professional help is specific: a site redesign or a new launch (the earlier the better), a larger operation without in-house expertise, or a need for market and geographic knowledge you don’t have. Help is a tool for particular situations, not a default purchase.

That framing matters for how you should read every SEO pitch, including ours. The question is never “should I buy SEO,” it’s “what specific thing do I need that I can’t see or do myself right now.”

An agent changes that math in one direction only: it lowers the cost of doing it yourself. It doesn’t replace the judgment Google says you, or a hire, still have to bring.

Google is concrete about what a real SEO actually does for you: a review of your site’s content and structure, technical advice on things like hosting and redirects and JavaScript, content and keyword research, campaign management, training, and expertise in specific markets. In its current guidance it adds one more line item by name: optimization for generative AI.

Read down that list and a pattern appears. Almost all of it is diagnostic and advisory. Someone looks at your site and your data, tells you what’s wrong, and helps you decide what to do. The doing, the deciding, the retainer relationship: that stays with you.

That is the exact shape of what an agent can carry. It reviews structure and crawlability, surfaces technical issues, maps your queries to pages, and scores your generative-AI visibility, all from your own data. What it leaves alone is everything Google frames as a human relationship.

Both documents spend real space on warning signs, which is itself a signal: Google sees enough bad actors in this market to publish a list. The headline rule is the one to memorize. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Anyone who does is either misinformed or counting on you not knowing.

The rest of the list is about secrecy and shortcuts. A claimed special relationship with Google. Methods that can’t be explained. Pressure to join link schemes or submit your site to thousands of engines. Unsolicited emails offering to fix an SEO problem you didn’t know you had.

There’s a hard consequence attached, not just wasted money. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, Google says your site can be removed from the index entirely. The downside of the wrong help is worse than no help.

The defense Google recommends is unglamorous and effective: check any advice against the official documentation yourself, and be skeptical of any tool claiming Google’s blessing.