The topic
You've shipped a small tool that converts bank statement exports into clean spreadsheets for sole traders. It works. A few people found it through a forum post and like it. Now you want strangers to find it too.
So you do what most developers do. A launch post on a couple of sites, a thread on social media, maybe a Product Hunt listing. Traffic spikes for two days and then goes back to roughly nothing.
The fix is well known and slightly dull: pages that answer the questions your users are actually typing into search engines, published steadily, measured honestly, adjusted over months. You can absolutely do this yourself. Should you?
The discussion
Can you?
Yes. Search engine optimisation isn't secret knowledge, and AI writing tools make a first draft quick. You can set up analytics in an hour, connect Search Console, and write a guide called "How to convert a Barclays CSV for your self-assessment" this evening.
Is it cheaper?
In cash, nothing is cheaper than doing it yourself. In time, it's a standing commitment. A realistic loop looks like this every week: check what's being indexed and what isn't, look at which pages people actually reach, pick the next question to answer, write and fact-check the piece, publish it, and note what to watch. Call it half a day if you're disciplined.
That half day competes directly with building. For most developers the building wins, week after week, and the marketing doesn't fail so much as stop. Search rewards consistency over months, so an effort that stops after five weeks has mostly cost you five half days.
Is it better?
Nobody knows your product better than you, and that matters. Your instinct for what your users struggle with is the raw material of good content.
What you're less likely to bring is the discipline of the loop: measuring against a real objective rather than a vanity number, noticing when a page is crawled but not indexed, and writing in a way that doesn't read like it came straight out of an AI tool (search engines and readers are both getting better at spotting that). Doing it yourself is better for insight. Handing it off is often better for consistency.
So, should you?
Do the first month yourself. You'll learn what your users search for, and that knowledge is worth keeping in your own head.
After that, ask one honest question: is this still happening every week? If yes, carry on. If it's become the job you push to next week, it's worth either cutting the scope (one useful page a fortnight beats an abandoned weekly plan) or handing the routine part to someone who'll keep it going while you build.
Where we can help
We built GrowthOS to run this weekly loop for our own products, under a written permission ledger so it never publishes or spends beyond what's been approved. You can read how it works. Through Marketing & Growth we'll run the same system for your product, on terms agreed with you up front, usually a small cut of what the work earns or a fixed fee. Get in touch and tell us what you've built.