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. Hi everyone, I'm Neil Patel. And today I'm going to break down how much time you should spend on SEO in order to rank number one. (cheerful music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel. And if you're on YouTube,
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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. So then that way you get more people to read your articles, which helps increase social shares, and that also helps increase backlinks.
I want you to also spend one hour a week creating new lead magnets to grow your email subscriber base. So that's like a guide to SEO or how to get your dog to
lose weight in 30 days. Those are all examples of lead magnets and you'd collect emails. 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. These are competing domains, right? Because if we both share
a lot of common keywords that means we're in similar industry. 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. And if that keyword was never related to the page in the first place, I don't worry about it.
But if that keyword is related, I go and google that term. I look to see all the
people who rank above me and I try to create content
that's way better them. I tried to create a user
experience that's better than them. I really focus on going above and beyond and being better than my competition. 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 a weekly basis, and these are the main tasks. There's lot of other, you know, ancillary SEO tasks that I work on for my site, but these are the main things. 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.
And I found that over the years, if you build a brand, you rank higher when it comes to SEO because Google trust brands. They don't want people to
put up false information that can hurt others. 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. So then that way, when
I create new content and let people know about it, this allows me to generate
much, much more traffic. 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.
This isn't about word
count or deleting posts. This is just about making
sure they're relevant. Of course, if something's really outdated, like let's say about
MySpace of social network that doesn't really exist, we'll just delete that. But generally speaking, I have a team of around six, seven
people that just spend time updating old content to make
sure it's still relevant because we don't want anyone to read anything that's old or outdated that can hurt them. 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.
If you need help doing this check on my ad agency, NP digital. If you enjoyed this video, like it, share. If you have any questions, leave a comment below
I'm here to answer it and help you out..
