Video
Should You Fire Your SEO Agency and Use ChatGPT or Claude Instead?
Should you fire your SEO agency and do your SEO yourself with ChatGPT or Claude? I run an SEO agency, and for a lot of small businesses my answer is: give it a try. Here are the three things I’d do if I were doing it myself.
By Alex Kim · Co-founder, Workbench SEOIt depends on your situation
Honestly, it’s a complicated answer. It really depends on your situation. If you’re a plumber or a roofer with two or three employees, and you don’t have the budget to spend $2,500 a month on an SEO agency, you should definitely give it a try.
If I were going to do it, these are the things I would do.
1. Put in the work, because AI websites all look the same
Don’t expect different results if you’re not willing to put the work in. I’m sure you’ve seen a million Claude-generated websites at this point. If you’re watching this video, I’m sure you’ve experimented with AI.
They all look the same. They all write the same. They all put out the same content. Google knows that, and it’s looking out for it. Google calls it scaled content abuse, and it’s a penalty that’s going to come out more and more in the future.
Basically, you have to be willing to put in the work to make your site, your content and your SEO differentiated, and that comes through research.
2. The Edward Show habit
That brings me to my second point. If I had to give one habit, one takeaway from this video, it would be to listen to The Edward Show or a similar podcast every single morning. Listen to the guests and the interviews, and figure out what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
They’re talking about tactics, and not only the tactics but why they do them. Once you have those tactics, and this is the important part, download the transcripts and ingest them into your AI.
This is something I do every day. It might only be one podcast a week, but if I hear a new guest, or somebody I know is really good, I put their entire transcript into my AI and say, “I want you to educate me on this topic,” so I can go through the nuance the podcast didn’t get into and get the information for myself.
Use a practitioner’s brain, not just Google’s guidance
You can also use it for actual execution later. Say you’re looking to build more authority on your website, and you need to learn about link building because you’ve never done it. You can say, “Claude, go through my practitioner’s brain and tell me what the practitioners would do. Audit my website for what they would do to build more authority through links.” Practitioner’s brain is what I call mine.
It will tell you, and that’s not coming from Google’s guidance. It’s coming from actual practitioners.
3. Test it yourself
The third thing: you have to test things out yourself. You can’t learn how to dribble a basketball through Claude or ChatGPT. You can research the mechanics of dribbling, gravity and all these different things, and you can watch YouTube videos. But at the end of the day, you need to go out to the driveway and start dribbling that ball.
It’s the same thing with SEO. You need to understand what to do and why, and then you have to actually implement it and run tests. If you listen to the top SEOs, they all talk about running tests, because they need to verify that something actually works in the results.
So make single-variable changes. Set a reminder to check them in one, two, three or four weeks, and see what actually works. You’ll gain a lot of information, because you’ll find tactics that actually work. You’ll implement them across your sites, or your one site, and you’ll start to understand how the algorithms work. That’s the real work that goes into it.
So, should you fire your SEO agency?
It depends. That’s the answer for most things. And it depends entirely on how much work you want to put in, how much time you have for it, and whether your brain is actually built for it.
SEO is really good for hyper-focused, obsessive people. If you’re a hands-on business owner with that mentality, go for it. I definitely think you can outperform an SEO agency by yourself, because you understand your business.
But if you’re not ready for that, definitely look into other options.
