Can I do SEO myself?

Yes, for the parts that need your knowledge rather than a specialist's: opening Search Console, filling in the Google Business Profile properly, asking every customer for a review, photographing your work, and fixing the page titles. Those are free, they take an afternoon to start, and they are the foundation any paid work would begin from. The parts worth paying for are the technical fixes, the writing of pages from query data, and the reading of the numbers every month.

What you can do this week

1. Open Search Console and verify the site. It is free, and it is the only place that shows which searches already show your site and which pages Google has indexed. Read the query report and the Pages report.
2. Fill in the Google Business Profile: the primary category for the money search, every predefined service you do, real hours including Saturdays if true, photographs of real work, and the review link ready to send. This decides the map pack and it moves within weeks.
3. Ask every customer for a review at the end of the job, in one sentence, and send the link the same evening. Reply to every review within a day. Never gate, never incentivise, never ask family.
4. Rewrite the page titles. Search site:yourdomain.co.uk and read them as a customer would. Each should lead with the service and the area, under 60 characters.
5. Photograph the work. A phone photograph of the finished job, captioned with the job and the town, does more for a page than three paragraphs.

What is worth paying for

The technical work needs someone who can read Search Console's indexing reasons, run a crawl, fix redirects and structured data, and make a site fast on a phone. The writing needs someone who reads the query report, chooses the search at position 12 that could be at position 4, and writes the page that answers it, after a conversation with you. The monthly reading of the numbers needs someone who knows what a dip means and what to leave alone. An owner can learn all three, and most do not have the hours; a business that tries usually does the profile well once and then stops, which is when it stops working.

The split that works

You do what only you can: photographs, reviews, noting the questions customers ask on the phone, and fifteen minutes a month on what the business wants more of. The paid person does what needs expertise: the technical checks, the page from the query data, the mentions, the report. Neither works without the other. A company that does not ask for your part is writing pages from guesswork, and an owner who does only their part has a good profile and a site that ranks for its own name.

How to know whether you need help

Open Search Console's Pages report. If the number of indexed pages is well below the number of pages you have, or the not-indexed rows are long, the problem is technical and it is worth paying to fix, because nothing else shows until it is. If the pages are indexed and the query report shows impressions with no clicks, the titles and the pages are the problem, and the titles you can fix yourself this afternoon. If the site is fine and the map pack is the problem, the profile is the answer, and that is yours to do.