credit: F3R/n@nd0 (FJTU)

One of the hardest questions to answer about an SEO project is how long it takes to see major change in the results. There are three major factors:

1. How long it takes to implement your changes
2. What changes your competitors are making concurrently
3. Whether the Search Engines make a major change during your implementation

Depending on your situation you should be watching the results for 30 – 60 to determine your trend for the campaign.

In this post I will address the implementation time for the major needs of an SEO campaign. I am breaking the steps down into hours of work that each step takes as a baseline; I assume there are no major technical/political barriers that stop you from performing any task, and that you are not reviewing a mega-site (1,000′s of pages).

Stoney deGeyter wrote a comprehensive checklist for web marketing that you should checkout to see all of the little things that go in to the design and marketing of your site. I am going to focus more on the Search Optimization tasks.

Domain and URL Concerns

Site.com redirect to www. version: Alternate Domain redirects Home page redirect to root Keywords in directory names

Hyphenations Product names Brand names No underscores in filenames

The domain concerns can be assessed all at once and take 1 -2 hours for most sites. Usually this only requires traveling through the site manually and making sure that there are no situations that break from consistency or introduce a barrier to search engines. For larger dynamic sites, especially ones that have brought in content from legacy partners & databases, this could be a whole day to test every situation. Once the plan has been laid out expect 2 – 4 hours to create, implement & test your 301-redirects (if you are using a IIS server this can take significantly longer) and 2 -16 hours to rename/re-code filenames.

Design Concerns

Descriptive links Good on-page organization On page formatting Avoid text in images

Avoid requiring plugins Minimize the use of graphics Understandable graphic file names Proper use of tags

Design concerns are one of the easiest things to see from the outset, but they are also the aspect that suffers the most from inconsistent implementation. Manually traveling through your site and finding what issues are present will take 2 – 4 hours for most sites. This can be assessed concurrently with domain/URL needs. Implementation is dependent on the amount of file renaming & image recreation that you have to do. Figure on 15 – 30 minutes per page to implement changes.

Architectural Concerns

Correct robots.txt file: 1 – 2 hours Validate HTML: 1 – 8 hours Don’t use frames: 8 -16 hours (may take re-design) Custom 404 error page: 1 – 2 hours Validate CSS: 1 – 2 hours Proper site hierarchy: 2 – 4 hours Optimize page size: 3 – 8 hours

Review noindex usage: 1 – 2 hours Unique titles on all pages: 1 – 4 hours Check broken links: 2+ hours Unique descriptions on pages: 2+ hours Navigational issues: 2 – 4 hours Good anchor text: 1 – 2 hours

Architectural concerns are most important from a search engine perspective. The right-hand column can all be done in the same manual review of your site, but it is still going to take many hours to catalog all of the necessary changes. In total you should expect 8+ hours to perform an architectural review that will be some combination of the above issues and 40 – 120 hours to implement changes depending on how much of your site is dynamic or requires re-coding. I should mention that validating your code is not strictly necessary for search optimization, but it is a good habit to avoid broken code.

Content Concerns

Enhancing keyword usage (SEO) Customer focused Targets specific searches Provides reassurances

Contains internal contextual links Web version of PDF docs available Consistent use of phrases

Professional content is going to take about 1 hour per 250 words. Depending on your needs the amount of content to be produced will vary, also editing takes significantly less time. You can save yourself some time here by buying licensed content and re-writing. If you already have content in place and you’re editing for optimization it takes about 30 minutes per 250 words.

Sitemap

Update information Linked from help and 404 pages Link to xml sitemap in robots.txt file

Visible site hierarchy Appropriate description in html

XML sitemaps are not always necessary, but expect 1 – 2 hours for each of your sitemaps (XML and HTML).

Keyword Research

Sometimes keywords are very clear, like when you are aiming to rank organically for things that you are using paid search for. But, expect that you need to invest 4 -10 hours into keyword research to get a comprehensive understanding of how people are searching and what you are competing with.

The Total

To assess and implement all of the best practices on an existing site you should expect between 60 and 180 hours of full time work – plus time to create any new content. These hours are the foundation of your campaign; what you will build on with links and social media etc. I strongly recommend that any organic search optimization campaign start by getting these on site factors in place.