[notkurt]

Depending on your industry, SEO can be crucial part to scaling your business. These days provided you have the technical aspects right, site speed, mark up, structuring etc - you'll have a solid framework to build from. It's harder to pull those black hat tactics that we've all heard of, so it's best you just focus on providing quality content, and ensure Google is indexing it. Developing a strategy isn't too hard, utilise tools like Answer The Public to develop out your strategy, monitor search console for changes and adjust as needed.

From experience I've seen clients who've hired a SEO agency years back, and have never stopped paying them due to the fear their traffic will bottom out. I do believe SEO agencies offer value, however base level offerings such as technical suggestions and keyword strategy don't get businesses far. Typically the people who pay for the base level offerings don't have the in house talent to write solid blog posts / action the suggestions. Plus most base level offerings could be augmented by paying for a tool like SEMRush yourself, and letting the automated reports run.

Long tail searches with little competition are the easy wins. Popular keywords will take time and effort, but usually with alot of work involved.