Can I Do AEO In-House, or Do I Need an Agency?

1. What you can absolutely do yourself

None of this needs expertise. It needs an afternoon and a willingness to be specific.

• —Write your FAQs. Take the questions you answer on the phone, write two-sentence answers with real numbers, put them on the matching page.
• —Publish price ranges. Honest ranges with the factors that move them. This alone separates you from most competitors.
• —State your service area as a list of city names in text.
• —Rewrite your page openings to answer first. What it is, what it costs, how long it takes, where you do it — then the pitch.
• —Fix your business details. Same name, phone, hours and categories on your site, Google Business Profile and every directory you can find.
• —Ask for reviews consistently, and never script them.

That list is roughly 70% of the practical benefit, and an agency would charge you a retainer to extract it from you in a discovery call.

2. What is harder to do yourself

Be realistic about these. They are where in-house efforts stall.

• —Structured data. Getting LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage schema right, validated, and consistent across many pages is fiddly work with no visible reward until it is correct.
• —Site speed. Real Core Web Vitals work usually means changing how the site is built, not tweaking a setting.
• —Page architecture. Deciding how many service and city pages you need, and how they link to each other, is where most DIY sites end up either too thin or a pile of near-duplicates.
• —Volume. Twelve city pages that are each genuinely specific is a lot of writing. Thin duplicates are worse than nothing.
• —Consistency over time. The habit is simple; keeping it for eight months while running a business is not.

3. The in-house checklist for one month

If you want to test whether you can carry this yourself, run this for four weeks and see how it feels.

• —Week 1: list your ten most valuable questions — service plus city, price questions, "best X in Y." Run each through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. Write down who gets named.
• —Week 2: pick your top two services. Rewrite each page opening to answer first with real numbers. Add five FAQs each.
• —Week 3: reconcile your business details everywhere and complete your Google Business Profile. Ask five recent customers for reviews.
• —Week 4: open Search Console. Find question-shaped queries you get impressions for but have no dedicated page for. Write one of those pages.

4. The real decision is hours, not knowledge

The information in this post is the whole methodology. There is no hidden layer an agency unlocks. The question is whether the person who knows your business has four to six hours a month, indefinitely, and will actually spend them here.

For a lot of owners the answer is no, and that is a perfectly good reason to hire. Just hire for output — pages written, schema implemented, details reconciled — not for access to knowledge you already have.

Run the numbers before you decide. If you are paying $1,500 a month for an SEO retainer, that is $18,000 a year against a $1 build plus $50 a month hosting. The savings calculator does that math in thirty seconds.

5. The hybrid that usually works best

The setup we see succeed most often for local businesses splits the work along the line where it naturally breaks.

• —Pay once for the structure: a fast site with the right number of pages, schema implemented, answer-first templates in place. Finite, one-time, done.
• —Keep the facts in-house: prices, ranges, timelines, FAQs, service areas. You are the only source.
• —Outsource volume if you need it: blog drafts and city page writing, bought as a defined batch rather than an open-ended retainer.
• —Keep the monthly habit yourself: one hour, Search Console plus your ten AI questions plus one fix.

That is close to how we price on purpose — a $1 build for five pages, $50 per additional page, $50 a month hosting, an optional blog pack, cancel by email, 30 days money back, and no sales call. The structural work is finite, while hosting begins 30 days after checkout and is billed monthly.

6. When you should definitely get help

A few situations where DIY is false economy.

• —Your site is slow and you cannot change how it is built.
• —You need twelve or more city or service pages and you know you will not write them.
• —Your business details are scattered across dozens of inconsistent listings.
• —You are in a genuinely competitive market where every competitor already has the structure.
• —You have tried the monthly habit twice and it did not stick. That is data, not a character flaw.

If you want an outside read before deciding anything, the free audit checks the technical and structural signals, and the page planner tells you how many pages your business actually needs. Both are free and neither triggers a phone call.