SEO Time Management – Getting the Proportions Right

Whether you’re responsible for the SEO of a large corporate website or optimising a blog in your bedroom, you will need to plan the relative amount of time that you or your team are going to spend implementing your search engine optimisation strategy. This article is intended to help focus your thoughts on planning how to distribute the time and resources you spend on SEO.

Elements in your SEO strategy

Firstly you have to plan a strategy, which will differ depending on your circumstances, but there are number of common elements that will run through any web SEO program. Putting together a full strategy is outside the scope of this article, but the following items should be part of your SEO mix:

• Writing core content (researching and writing content that makes up the long term information architecture of your website – see IA for more info)
• Writing blog content (researching and writing regular posts on your website in your core area of business)
• Writing content on other influential sites (in order to gain traffic and credit from search engines)
• Social  media community management (managing discussions and gaining interesting and attention from your audience)
• Social media campaign management (outgoing marketing activities using social media channels)
• Html/markup optimisation (maintaining well formed, accessible html)
• Building tools (providing users with online tools relating to your core business to attract traffic)
• Analysing stats (monitorin the effectiveness of your campaigns)

Note I’ve included external content and 2 social media activities that I see as being part of ‘SEO’, because they are part of a backward linking strategy, aimed to improve your standing with search engines. There are other parts of social media, such as reputation management and conversation monitoring that I don’t see as part of the SEO picture (but are absolutely part of the internet marketing mix). Likewise offline media and PPC may well be part of your overall strategy, but I don’t class them as part of SEO for the purposes of this plan. You may disagree and depending on how you plan your time and resources, it may make sense to include them in the same plan, but hopefully this article will help focus your thoughts on the SEO side of things.

Relative importance

The relative importance of these elements will no doubt differ, depending on the scale of the website you’re planning for, your preferred SEO strategy and the maturity of your website. 

SEO mix for a website in its infancy

The following is a ball park ratio I’ve put together for a site in it’s infancy:

activity	% time
writing core content	25
writing blog content	10
writing content on other sites	15
social media community management	5
social media campaign management	10
html/markup optimisation	20
building tools	10
analysing stats	5

SEO mix for a more mature website

activity	% time
writing core content	10
writing blog content	15
writing content on other sites	15
social media community management	15
social media campaign management	20
html/markup optimisation	5
building tools	5
analysing stats	15

 

Future trends in SEO time planning

As your website matures, you will no doubt spend less time on your core content, more time blogging, managing social media and analysing your performance. As social media becomes more important, the time spent in this area may well increase further.

It would be interesting to hear your comments on how well this represents your SEO balance.

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