How Much Time Should You Spend on SEO in Order to Rank #1?

A key to SEO is setting realistic expectations. If you want to rank at the top, you should know this. Today I'm going to break down how much time you should spend on SEO in order to rank number one.

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If you want to grow slow and steady, spend three to six hours doing research and creating content per week. Spend four hours in competitive research per month to identify new opportunities with keywords you are still not targeting, but that aren't too competitive. I want you to spend another four hours optimizing for technical SEO per month. And you can do this through the Ubersuggest Site Audit report.

And if you want to grow aggressively, right, not slow and steady, but you want to grow aggressively, I want you to spend three hours a day doing research and creating content.

Spend a minimum of one hour per day, doing Link Building and Content Promotion. If you create a lot of content, you don't ever promote it, you're just not going to get the traffic no matter how good your content is. And then you need to spend at least three hours per week writing emails for your email subscribers and scheduling them.

And you can use tools like Hello Bar for that. You can use tools like OptinMonster for them. And you want to spend a minimum of three hours creating and scheduling content for your strongest social media platforms. Right, these platforms that you're already doing well on, and you want to focus your attention on that. You could spend all your time on all the platforms out there, but we all know there's not enough time in the day for that.

So do you want to know how I spend my time on SEO with the site that's already established? Well, the way I spend my time is every single week I go onto Ubersuggest and I look for keyword opportunities. So on Ubersuggest I can type in my domain name, neilpatel, and there's a report that looks at competitive domains and it shows me all the other competing domains. The keywords that I rank on that they also rank for.

Then I also look for all the keywords that they rank for, that I don't rank for. And then I start looking at those keywords and seeing if they're related enough for me to create content around. And then I start creating content around those pages.

And if you also have established website like me, the other big group of time that I spent a lot of energy on is I go onto Google search console. And I look for all the pages that are getting less traffic quarter over quarter, year over year. And if I can see trends of pages declining in traffic, I look for the keywords that are actually declining related to those pages.

The next thing that I spend time on is I make sure that my site is buttoned up from on-page SEO perspective. It doesn't matter how much content creation that you have, or how much Link Building generation that you're doing. If Google can't crawl your website, you're screwed. So I just make sure that my site's buttoned up.

And if you create a project in Ubersuggest, it'll automatically run a weekly site audit and tell you when there's new errors that you need to fix and it shows them to you. So just fix those in priority because the ones that Ubersuggest presents first are the ones that you should fix first. Because they'll have the biggest impact in growing your traffic.

And the last thing that I spend my time on when it comes to SEO, believe it or not, is collecting tons and tons of email. I found that if I build a brand, they call it the rule of seven in marketing. When someone sees or interacts with your brand seven times, they're much more likely to evangelize it, buy your product, tell other people about it.

So by collecting emails, putting out more lead magnets, maybe blocking off part of my blog posts and say, put in your email to read the rest, by putting off free tools that allow me to collect emails and then sending out email blast.

Now, one thing that my team spends a lot of time on that I don't, but this has helped my rankings is my team goes and updates a lot of my old content. And they just make sure it's fresh and up-to-date, and still relevant.

And by doing that, we continue to maintain and grow on our SEO traffic. And that's how established website should continually spend their time. You can also add in a lot of other tasks, but that's where we spend the majority of our time to maintain and grow our traffic

[ExposureNinja]

Great to see you cover this - seen quite a few of your viewers ask about it in comments on previous videos! 😁

[MarketingHarry]

Competitor research is very important, same as creating relevant content. Useful as always! Simple guide for everyone to organise their time.

[ChrisProutyVideos]

What I like most about this advice is that the times you recommend are manageable for the busy entrepreneur.

[PassiveIncomeTom]

Excellent information Neil! A lot of great tips here. 🔥🔥🔥

[fidahussain]

All time best video. Love you Neil Patel

[ArtLevin]

Great Information. Thank you. My ecommerce store bounce rate is 60%. How important the bounce rate and how to improve the rate.

[prolanzdigital]

Pls what's the right way to update a blog post

[vernontolentino]

Hi Neil, to grow aggressively how many contents should we make per day and per week? Can you also give information for content promotion aside from email blasts and social sharing? and how many emails per week should we send out? looking forward to answers. Thanks

[wheretheskygrows]

hi Neil, do you have any articles or videos on how to rank for keywords beyond your location? I find that some pages on my site rank great locally and I get good organic traffic in my general area for those keywords. But how can I learn to write in order to rank for searches outside of my state?

[ericmgoddard]

Thanks Neil. Quick question, I have three domains that point to the same website, and I read somewhere that having multiple domains to one website might damage Google ranking. Is this true, and if so, would it be worthwhile attaching two of the domains to a landing page and squeeze page or should these type pages be only attached to sub domains. Thanks in advance for any guidance here 😊

[alokgautam]

Could you plz suggest the best lead magnet for a site related to tech( smartphones & Pc) to collect emails. I tried almost everything but non of them worked 😔… Plz help

[harishguruswami]

Social Media Analyst And Content writer with knowledge in Two Indian languages Tamil Telugu and English.
Who has written TVc and Thetricals. Can I Work With Neil Patel .

[sajjad]

Hello neil sir.. I wanna know why I'm losing some keywords & what is the steps to save them?

[raodey]

Sir, Uber suggest shows 50 to 60 % less traffic

[prateek]

Does the blog rank good if it have a YouTube video in it?

[marwansuliman]

Hello Neil am subscriber I went on your website I filled the small ap to get your services for my girlfriend business never got the schedule call am 😢

[hyderabadisohail]

Sir I want to start seo freelanceing . How much time will it take to learn seo

[geoffmeakin]

01:23 Please always say social shares like this

[mohitsharmagarg]

But sir it's very hard to build backlinks and only backlinking can take 3 hours a day 😂