How growing in-house marketing teams outgrow DIY SEO

Do-it-yourself SEO works…until it doesn’t scale. I’ve seen DIY approaches drive incredible early momentum, and in many cases, it’s exactly the right move at the beginning. But as teams and businesses grow, the same tactics that once worked can quietly start creating friction.

I first saw this pattern during the dot-com era. Small teams moved fast, but scale exposed every shortcut.

In this article, I break down why that happens, what “SEO debt” means, and how mature teams evolve their SEO approach without losing control.

DIY SEO is often the right choice early on

Early-stage teams don’t need enterprise frameworks, layered governance, or a 40-page SEO strategy doc, for example. Instead, they need traction. Momentum and proof that content plus search equals movement. And, many teams get those real wins, rankings, and traffic spikes. They get leads from pages no one thought about much before.

Early wins are exhilarating. I’ve seen teams celebrate the spike in rankings and leads, until SEO starts feeling harder and the assumption becomes, “SEO stopped working.” In most cases, that’s the wrong story.

The shift happens quietly as the business grows from SMB to enterprise level. There’s no alarm or obvious breaking point, just a growing sense that what used to be straightforward now feels… stuck. Slower and messier and harder to coordinate.

In competitive markets, it’s more noticeable. For example, the Bay Area is home to several tech giants. In turn, they have more stakeholders. There are more pages, less margin for error, and more pressure.

It’s easy to feel like your trustworthy marketing buddy turned into a snake. But search engine optimization doesn’t change from a cat to a dog. It grows from a cub to a lion. Done correctly, the effects of search optimization only become more robust and effective.

Early SEO wins hide complexity and future constraints

Early SEO wins often mask structural complexity. Small sites benefit from fewer dependencies, fewer competing priorities, and greater algorithmic flexibility, making tactical improvements disproportionately effective.

The truth is, early SEO wins are almost always simple in hindsight. Fix the obvious technical issues, clean up page titles, answer questions your competitors haven’t yet answered…

Small sites get a lot of grace, because many start with barely any visibility. Publishing high-quality, well-optimized content can quickly help you rank for less competitive terms, often coupled with less search volume. Less traffic means structural problems are often less noticeable. A handful of strong pages can carry the entire domain.

This early success can create a dangerous kind of confidence for small DIY teams. “If we keep doing what we’re doing, it’ll keep working.” Makes sense, but what worked with one marketer or a tiny team moving quickly doesn’t scale cleanly or easily.

For example, a small team can publish content fast. URLs are often created based on whatever sounds right at the moment, unless they’re auto-generated by the CMS.

Increased SEO complexity can take a site from success to stagnation

Typically, small business websites start with a site structure like:

• Blog posts live under /blog/
• Guides live under /resources/
• Some thought leadership lives under /insights/
• A few strong pieces just sit at the root because they “felt important”

And it works. Traffic grows, rankings appear, and no one complains.

But what happens when the company and team scale? Now there are multiple writers creating content, product pages that need supporting content, and leadership wants clarity on what’s actually converting.

Suddenly, you have similar topics that compete with each other for search and user attention. “High-performing” content doesn’t align cleanly with business goals, and internal links are inconsistent or accidental. And updating the site in any meaningful way for technical SEO can feel risky because so much depends on it now.

You can fix it, but now it could mean a site migration to a better platform/site design. It means rewriting content that no longer performs. You now need to coordinate across teams and team members to optimize a large site that has been consistently managed as if it were only a few pages (this happens to most teams as a company grows).

You may initially overlook the challenges because the numbers can still appear fine for a while. Traffic is growing; rankings are holding; nothing is obviously on fire.

That’s the trap.

SEO gets more complex as a business grows, even if the team stays small

Early on, when I started in this industry, SEO often supported a single product, audience, or market. As a business or market grows, however, that single strategy becomes multiple strategies that must coexist without cannibalizing and taking over each other. Your audience breaks into segments narrowed by intent, language, location, or maturity. Two products turn into complete product chains.

While none of this necessarily requires more people, it does require more decisions. What used to be “just publish good content” for fledgling teams becomes:

• Which market gets priority?
• Which product deserves authority?
• Which pages lead and which support?
• What do we not optimize yet?
• How are we building trust across our online presence?

More handoffs and dependencies. More “we’ll get to it later.” SEO decisions get slowed down or deprioritized because no one owns the whole picture anymore. This connects directly to what we’ve already talked about:

• Shared capability without shared understanding
• Leadership gaps between intent and execution

Everyone is touching SEO. Fewer people are responsible for it.

Tools, checklists, and hustle can’t replace shared understanding and coordinated decision-making

The next step is almost a given because it happens so often. When SEO complexity increases, teams often reach for tools, dashboards, crawlers, alerts, and project management layers. Maturing into more powerful tools feels like the responsible thing to do; the professional next step.

Tools can help create visibility and sometimes save you time. But tools don’t solve prioritization problems if you don’t understand what you’re seeing, and dashboards track activity rather than decisions. Another process is unlikely to create alignment in and of itself. In fact, at this stage, another tool or a more powerful version often creates the illusion of control rather than the reality of it.

Everything is visible, but nothing is truly decided. Metrics get tracked without context. Keyword research is random instead of mapped. Issues get logged without resolution. Process becomes bureaucracy instead of support. Even as the team believes they’re doing everything right, SEO debt begins to build.

SEO debt accumulates quietly and only becomes visible at scale

SEO debt isn’t just technical debt; it’s organizational and structural debt created when decisions prioritize speed over scalability. It’s what your site owes the future because the past was optimized for speed, not longevity. Decisions were made that made sense at the time. They worked, but now they make growth harder.

It’s not just one thing, either. SEO debt can touch every aspect of your business. It can look like:

• Content is published without a clear categorization system
• Overlapping topics competing with each other
• URLs chosen for convenience instead of strategy
• Pages written for keywords rather than intent
• Articles that rank but don’t convert
• Content no one feels safe touching because it “still gets traffic”
• CMS limitations are worked around instead of being addressed
• Decisions made across teams without shared context
• SEO is considered late in projects instead of during planning
• Knowledge living in people’s heads instead of systems

SEO debt is the natural result of growth without evolution. Every growing team accumulates some. But the difference in results is whether the team recognizes it and adapts before it becomes a performance drag.

Mature teams don’t abandon SEO; they evolve with it

Mature teams treat SEO as an operating system, not a marketing tactic. Early on, traffic is the goal. DIY handles that just fine. Later, it’s about impact, and traffic alone isn’t enough. At scale, impact and coordination matter more than volume.

At this stage, SEO stops being something you do after the fact and starts being something you plan with. It’s not a separate discipline you call in, like a fill-in quarterback, when the standard play doesn’t work. It’s part of how decisions get made.

Teams that handle this transition well don’t “hand SEO off.” Instead of “The marketing campaign is over, now let’s optimize the content,” they learn to consider optimization during the strategy planning.

What SEO maturity looks like in practice:

SEO maturity means designing a structure before execution and making fewer accidental decisions. You aren’t looking for perfection. You’re looking for clarity. Proper SEO builds that clarity for you, your teams, your business, the search engines, and, most importantly, your target audience.

Before work begins:

• Decide which pages are leads, which are supports
• Decide which conversions matter by page type.
• Pick the pages that are supposed to rank and carry authority. Everything else should support it.

Design your site structure intentionally:

Choose your categories based on business needs and buyer intent, rather than whatever suits you. Let data inform how you build instead of retrofitting later.

If a category can’t be clearly defined, defended from overlap, and consistently assigned by different people, it won’t survive scale. For example, if writers can’t agree on which category a piece belongs to, you have too many categories. Most healthy sites land between 5 and 9 primary categories, but there is no perfect number, just the number a team can consistently maintain without overlap or debate.

Lay out your internal linking rules:

Are there pages that should be the only ones you link to when talking about a specific topic? For example, we might link to our strategic SEO training page or site optimization services. However, we want to choose one, and only one, money page.

Set rules for what happens when a page is taken down:

Do you reroute to a similar page? Let it set as a 404? One of our rules is that if you take a page down, you reroute to a similar page. If there is no similar page, let it return 404/410 and remove the links across the site.

Define what you’re optimizing now:

Traffic is a metric, not a strategy. Focus on outcomes – whatever matters, but pick it instead of letting the chips fall where they may. Is this SEO strategy meant to increase leads and demo requests? Build more quality traffic in a specific market?

Outgrowing DIY SEO is feedback, not failure

When SEO starts feeling harder, it’s rarely because something broke. It’s because the business changed. Growth expands complexity, and the systems that worked when everything was small start showing their limits.

DIY SEO works best when the scope is tight, decisions are obvious, and speed matters more than coordination. As companies grow, however, the surface area expands into more pages, more markets, more products, and more consequences. The approach that once created momentum can quietly create friction. Not because it failed, but because the way the team works with SEO hasn’t evolved yet.

Teams that recognize this early don’t panic, chase tools, or outsource responsibility. They change how SEO fits into planning, ownership, and decision-making. They make fewer decisions by accident and more on purpose. That’s when SEO stops feeling fragile. That’s when it becomes a stabilizer instead of a liability.

Growth exposes limits. Mature teams evolve the system instead of blaming the result.

If DIY SEO no longer fits the reality of your business, it’s time to rethink the approach. At Level343, we help teams redesign how SEO fits into planning, ownership, and execution so growth creates leverage, not friction. Ready to explore what evolution could look like for your team? Contact our team and let’s discuss your next steps.