Since we're in the optimization business, I figured it would be valuable to illustrate the ideal use of time for a website owner or a website team. These are, of course, my personal recommendations on the subject, but I believe that to a large extent, a close approximation of these percentages will yield the highest return on your invested time.
Each of the six activities in my chart are designed to help grow the popularity, quality and profitability of an online venture. This chart applies equally to a professional blog (though content creation might skew slightly higher while features/designs skew lower)or an e-commerce website (where testing/refining based on visitor data might need a bump), to social, Web 2.0-style ventures. Below, I've characterized the specific tasks involved in each process:
- Building Viral-Worthy, Authoritative Content (40%)
The goal here is to create articles, blogs posts, forms, applications, and multimedia content that will provide value to your visitors. I use the term viral-worthy to refer to pieces that have the ability to spread naturally. Even if the content is highly focused, try to picture an interested, passionate visitor finding your work on the site - would they be likely to email it to a friend, save it in their bookmarks or, at the least, return to the site in the future in the hopes of finding more pages like it?
Likewise, authoritative resources are those that are unquestionably head-and-shoulders above other available documents on the web. Your coverage, detail, research, writing quality, and entertainment factor should make it impossible for your competitors to catch up. When in doubt, read the Wikipedia article on your subject, then create something 100X better.
Content creation deserves the largest devotion of time because it is the anchor of a great site. All of your other efforts, from design to analytics to promotion, will be wasted if your site's material isn't intensely compelling. I think of content in a similar way to conversion rate - if you run a site with a 2% conversion rate, you need twice as many visitors as your competitor with a 4% rate. With content quality, the better it is, the fewer people you need to see your work before it spreads like wildfire across the web.
_ - Developing New Features/Designs (25%)
This component is the cousin to content creation. The goal is to never rest on your laurels when it comes to your site's offerings. If you currently have comments in your blog, consider upgrading to a threaded structure. If your e-commerce site has live chat, think about adding video demos. If your lackluster GUI looks and feels like 2002, upgrade it.
Development most often is tasked to programmers, designers, and site architects - the people responding for building the backbone of the site. Development is also an item that fluctuates drastically in the time commitment required. During a re-design and launch, it may consume 75-90% of your time for 4 months, then have very little upkeep over the next 6. Don't worry - this is normal, but guard against letting new development wait too long. Even if you're the leader in your field now, the only way to stay there is to consistently stay on the cutting edge.
_ - Keyword, Industry, & Competitive Research (10%)
Every week should allow time for, at the least, an evaluation of the changes your competition has made to their sites. Along with classic keyword research to find terms to target, you should also consider:- Identifying & researching new players in your market
- Investigating new opportunities on the web that could be leveraged to the benefit of your site
- Changes in keyword popularity or the introduction of a new phrase that could spell opportunity
- Analysis of your industry overall to find undiscovered niches or underserved markets
_
- Participating in Online Communities (10%)
This often has one of the highest rates of returns for informational/resource sites (including blogs). The idea is to find forums, blogs, social media sites, and other communities on the web where other industry mavens gather. Simply by building a positive profile through your comments, posts, and participation, you can reap tremendous rewards in links, attention, and positive reputation.
_ - Testing/Refining Based on Visitor Data (10%)
Though this may seem like a task suited primarily to e-commerce sites, it applies to service industry brands, blogs, and informational sites alike. Your visitor data, particularly if it provides action tracking, can show you which links are most valuable, which keywords return the highest value, where to focus your advertising efforts, and how to get more visitors to "convert," however that term may apply in your situation.
The act of analysis itself should be less than half the time you invest here. The other portion should be used to make changes to your site based on your theories of performance, test, analyze, refine, and repeat. Ad placement, button use, contextual clues, headlines, calls to action, and hundreds of other factors all play a role. Start experimenting and you'll quickly learn what works for your particular audience.
_ - Manual Link Building (5%)
I'm not just making this element the lowest priority because of its distastefulness; I really believe that of the items you can spend your time on, one-off linkbuilding has a particularly low ROI. 95% of the value will come from just a few dozen links that you'll be able to acquire out of a few hundred. Pursue high-traffic, high-relevance links with fervor - devote a great deal of time and effort to obtaining the individual links that you believe will provide the greatest value, and don't spend too much time on the rest. Link building by hand can be demoralizing and unrewarding, but it's too important to ignore completely. Give it your all a couple hours each week and then go back to content. Your capillaries will thank you.
Obviously, not everyone is going to agree that this is the best use of time, and there may even be small elements that don't squarely fit into one of the above categories. However, I think that recognizing the relative value of each of your own website development and marketing tasks and scheduling out time for them individually will give you a clear set of goals and schedule you can stick to.
p.s. This model scales fairly well to web teams - a copywriter, an SEO/marketer, and a developer can easily split up these tasks for maximum efficiency (and yes, I recommend that all of them contribute to content creation).
Like the chart. I think your numbers are right on and this is a good starting place for any industry. Depending on competition in your marketplace...you can adjust for what others are lacking & take over their place!
Great ! Permission to translate in French ? :)
Malaiac
I agree with Jim Boykin. I think the time allocated to link building is light. I think of link building as a biz dev activity.15% ro 20% makes sense to me.
Some of that would have to come out of the hide of the content and new features segemens, which is a shame, because you do want that to be a very heavy component of the mix.
But if you don't tell anyone about it, it won't help you.
Great post! This is rock-solid SEO advice worth reading.
Great Post Rand! My company is just getting into SEO with our new webinar series and this has helped us organize our efforts. While I may be new to SEO, I strongly agree with allocating 40% of the time building great content.
If you build compelling content, people will come and SEO becomes much easier.
Rand --
Great article. I haven't actually done a breakdown like this before, but I think your numbers are probably about what I'm actually doing. Thanks for actually writing all of this up!
It's really nice blog about online advertising and good to know about this. Online marketing is really gaining rapid popularity. To promote our site or product we have to do advertising so that people should know about it. Even i used to promote my site and sell my product online through fullservicead and my business is really growing. Your article contains nice information and i find it very helpful.
Good article and great site! I'm new to internet marketing, and the few blogs I've read have been very helpful. My numbers a few months ago were 50% building website, 50% banging head against the wall. I do have one question regarding content: How do I get people to send me input regarding the content (and its relevance) for my website?
Great article. What about press releases...?
Nice article - and shows how important it is to spend time building great content....getting people to devote this time to quality content is often the hard part I've found.
I will add that 5% to link building is tiny in my book...but I might be biased in that area ;)
I agree with the 5% being low and will probably up our efforts there. If you have a high traffic site it makes up for a lower linkbuild rate.
Don't forget that the 10% devoted to community participation is also link building, but in a more viral, community sense. By link building, I really just meant the focused searching and link requests/purchases. In general, I find this to have a lower rate of return than community participation and content building.
My category of: Content Area Relationships 10%
... is indirectly worth a few very good links - it is communicating with, working together with and presenting to others in my content area. These are the Linkerati.
Rand and EGOL,
Could you give some examples of how you break out core and high level content development?
Core content is the basic informative information that your visitors might look for. High level content is very high interest topics that you put an extra level of effort into - enough that when you finish the job you advertise it on the top of your homepage and it gets lots of clickthroughs - and people stay on that page for several minutes or more. It is also high interest content that is worth sending out specific link requests for.
The SEOMOZ tools, web2.0 awards, beginners guide to SEO are examples from this site.
I met with the head of a new "SEO company" recently and he described 90% of his "SEO activity" as manually building and/or begging for links. He seemed to think creating quality content was a waste of time.
I may not know much, but I do know that's absolutely ridiculous, inefficient and tacky (begging?!).
That's not a "SEO Company". that's a link building company. I divide SEO into a few areas. There is more to it, but you get the idea.
Site Development - Making sure the website is SE friendly and follows best practices. This usually is done up front and doesn't require much updating. Especially if you build the best practices into a CMS.
Content Generation - Some SEOs do this in house or outsource it. Others just send out recommended content actions based on website stats to the client and then let the client handle the content generation.
Link Building - The part we all hate. If you do Content Generation correctly, then this becomes a lot easier.
Education - Showing the client how to become their own best friend. What good content is. How to participate in relevant communities. What blogs are. How it all relates to their success online.
I know some SEOs that are afraid of the education part. They are afraid the clients will dump them to do it in house. I on the other hand believe the relationship built by such activities will make you an indispensable part of their marketing program.
I personally want to be the person a company calls anytime they have a new marketing idea. Just to run it past me even if it doesn't involve me making money from them. I want to be the guy they trust. That's a client for life.
Where does reading blog posts fit in here? Research? 10%? Maybe I'm just way too unbalanced here but I spend a ton more time than that reading stuff like this and "staying on top of the market"
For those of us in marketing specifically, I think our position gears towards that research end. I'm definitely putting more like 8-10 hours a week into industry reading (but, then again, I'm working a tad bit more than 40 hours a week).
Nice post. I would make a general assumption that this is in direct relation to the website and I definitely agree that content generation, from a overall business visibility standpoint, is the most important. I tend to spend less time participating online (wish I had more time though) in comparison to reading online (blogs, news , etc).
Speaking from a client perspective, we're really getting into the time dedication for keyword research and competitive website and keyword analysis. We're in a fortunate spot because the site is offering new products and services in the near future, but when we initially refreshed our keyword strategy for them (done quarterly at the time), it really opened their eyes to new opportunities they were missing. "Widening the net" I believe was the term used. Thanks for the post!
I just used the back of an envelope to tally up how we are currently spending our time. This is mainly for an info site and a couple of small niche retail sites.
Core Content Development 35% High Level Content Dev. 20% Content Area Research 10% Content Area Relationships 10% Analytics and Response 10% Linkbuild 5% SEO (includes community) 5% Biz management 5%
EGOL - I'm pretty sure you must spend some considerable portion of time on design/development of the site (at least at the outset and during re-launches/updates)...
Otherwise, I'm seeing your numbers looking exactly how I'd predict. I really do like that you've broken out core content development vs. high level content - I should have done the same.
When I first read your numbers I thought that mine would be much different... but after doing the math it came out very close. I outsourced site design so that didn't show up in my numbers.
Also, I note now your "Testing/Refining Based on Visitor Data" category is the same as my "Analytics & Response" ... it just hit my mind as a different name.
Bottom line is that we are VERY similar.
Hi Rand,
I have been reading you for a couple of months, I had you in my list of about 50 must reading blogs in number 48 or so, right now you made it to number 2 in my list, great posts, thanks.
I guess the time distribution varies according to the field you are into, the stage of the website (new or stablished websites), your knowledge and accessibility to cutting edge technology.
This is a great read! I really like the emphasis given to creating useful content. One thing that struck me as being a big time consumer lately is management of outsourced services. What I mean by this is... I have a few content writers that are constantly writing content for me, which then frees up more time to promote my sites.
Outsourcing content can really shave time off the sometimes "boring" part of SEO and create time for partnership building and other SEO activities that it takes a true SEO pro to be successful at. :)
Work smarter not harder...
An excellent analysis and many thanks for starting the discussion. I also appreciate your caveat on the 40 hour work week model. Like many, I spend my research hours outside of the office and count them as valuable, if not more so, than some of the other activities that you list here. Can't we use the mathematics currently employed by our governement and just fold them in while leaving the percentages the same. :)
In light of the research end, I'm spending a bit more time on quality link building. I believe that it is MSN that has registered a patent that performs backlink analysis to determine relevance as well as related resources for inclusion in the results. As an information architect, I also find myself studying the structure of the site to see if it can easily be modified to map to the "new-new thing" of Hubs and Authorities. I then lobby heavily for content to be created that will fill any gaps that I find.
Thanks, Rand. This is another great article from my "best practices" folder to share with clients eager to grasp SEO. I find that valuable education builds trust rather than "in house" competition. SEO is hard, time consuming work that anyone can learn to do themselves, but it is usually not the best use of their time.
Rand, I like this a lot. It provides some important insight. (Note to self: File under Best Practices)
However (Cause you knew there would be a however, didn’t you?) what I’m not seeing here is the time you spend on hard marketing and sales, client meetings, report preparation and other important parts of operating a business. Since you posted this at 11:55 PM I’m guessing that these things are a part of the other 40 hours you spend being an entrepreneur.
TMS - I definitely wrote this more from the perspective of a web team or website-dedicated individual, rather than a full business perspective. We have two full time people at SEOmoz who are devoted solely to tasks like HR, Finance, Contract Management, Legal, etc. so yes - those sorts of business activities take a ton of time, as do offline sales, meetings, and other executive pieces.