What Sort of Time Commitment is SEO?

When it comes to doing SEO for your website, one of the major concerns you may have is how much time and money you’ll need to spend on it. If you’re hiring an SEO firm, then time IS money, and you’ll want to know a rough estimate of how much time the SEO firm will put in and, therefore, charge you for.

You can break down the steps necessary for SEO work, making it easier to judge how much time you or your SEO company will need to spend on each. The estimates given here do not take into account any major issues or technical problems that may arise. You may want to add in a few extra hours to each step to account for any problems that you may have to deal with. If your website is exceptionally large (a thousand pages or more), you may also want to add more time into your estimate.

Step 1: Domain/URL Issues – Two hours to a day

The first thing to do is to go through your website manually and make certain that everything is consistent. You also want to look for things that will cause a search engine robot to have difficulty navigating through your site. If you have a large, dynamic site or a site that brings in a lot of content from other sites that may change often, it may take you more than a couple of hours for this step. Once you’ve completed this step, expect it to take two to four more hours to create and test all of your 301-redirect links. It may also take between two and fifteen hours to rename or re-code any filenames depending on how your site is assessed.

Step 2: – Design issues – two to four hours plus 30 minutes per page

It’s easy to see many design issues, but it can be difficult to make certain that your design is consistent from page to page across your entire website. It may take a few hours to note down every design issue, but it shouldn’t take more than four or five hours. You can often note down these issues while you’re doing your domain/URL assessment, saving a bit of time. How long it takes to implement all of the changes you need to make at this step depends on how many pages you have. At most, you may end up spending half an hour on each page. If you’ve got a huge site, this can add days to your SEO.

Step 3: – Architectural Issues – 125 hours

The most important aspect of your webpage to a search engine is its architecture. While building a list of your architectural concerns can be done while making your other lists, the actual implementation of these changes may take days or weeks. Much of this depends on how dynamic your site is and just how much re-coding is necessary.

Step 4: – Content – half an hour / 250 words

Creating content that is search engine optimized can take a good amount of time, especially if you have a lot of content on your site. One way to save time and money on this step is to do the writing yourself; however, before you jump on that idea, make certain you understand how SEO works. Otherwise, you may do more harm that good. You can also purchase licensed content or rewrite your own content to include keywords.