- 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.
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Before we get started,
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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.
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If you have any questions,
leave a comment below I'm here to answer it
and help you out.