Knowing how much time you or someone on your in-house team will need to dedicate to your site is important. Maintaining a site doesn’t mean build it and forget it. If you want to be found by customers in Search Engines, you have to be constantly updating your content.
Content Creation and Editing
Here are formulas for figuring out man-hours to edit content:
Creation of article/page (writing the content): Number of pages x 3 hours = Total
Updating an article/page: Number of pages x 0.5 hours = Total
So if the site has 40 pages that need updates every month, the formula is:
40 x 3 = 120 hours to create the content
40 x 0.5 = 20 hours a month to maintain
The formula for updates could be more than 0.5 hours per page if you have a review process that involves more than one person in the company. If the owner needs to see the page before it is published, add another 0.5 hours to each page.
Posts
Blog posts or news articles only need creation and would not need maintenance in most situations.
If you want your site to average 10 posts a month, you would need to allocate approximately 30 hours a month to blogging.
Search Engine Optimization
You have to update your content if you want to be found in the Search Engines.
You can see how a site with lots of content that needs frequent updates can quickly be a big commitment in time. This should encourage you to simplify your site and create less pages with focused information. Too many sites become stagnant and therefore, drop in the Search Engine rankings because the site is too large and cumbersome to keep updated.
