One person can run topic-first SEO in four to five hours a week: a planning hour once a month, one writing block a week, half an hour to launch each page, an hour a week in the forums, and half an hour a month to maintain. The order of the Academy is the order of the month. The tool question comes last, and the honest answer is that a tool replaces the sorting hours and none of the writing hours.
The four modes
I split the week into 'four modes': plan, write, launch, maintain, plus the forum hour that belongs to step 5. Each mode gets a fixed slot. Planning happens on the first Monday of the month, not whenever a keyword tool sends an email. Writing happens in one block, not in gaps between customers.
The rule: do one mode at a time, on a fixed day, and never all four in one sitting. The consequence is that the work gets done. Trying to plan, write, promote and audit every week produces shallow versions of all four, and the fixed slot is the difference between a routine and a good intention.
| Mode | When | Time | What happens | Academy step |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | First Monday of the month | 1 hour | Read the ledger, re-sort the map, pick the month's three pages | Map, ledger |
| Write | One block a week | 2 hours | Blueprint, draft, the parts only you know, the checks | Write |
| Launch | Publish day | 30 minutes | The launch list | Promotion |
| Show up | Any day, one hour | 1 hour | Answer questions in your two places, under your own name | Beyond your site |
| Maintain | Last Friday of the month | 30 minutes | One update from the prune list | Prune |
By hand, or with the tool
| Job | By hand | With SitePerfector |
|---|---|---|
| Topics and the demand check | Your inbox, a free keyword tool, an afternoon per theme | Built from your site and your market. Up to 1,500 keyword ideas vetted |
| Reading the results: shape, who is there, winnable | Five minutes per keyword in a private window. Days per theme | Roughly 40,000 live results read per map. A named verdict per keyword |
| The map, marked covered, gap, ranking | A spreadsheet, a day per theme, kept by hand | The map, marked, with your own rankings laid over it |
| What to build first | Ten minutes a quarter with two columns | A call per topic: good to start, or wait |
| The blueprint per page | Twenty minutes per page | Generated from the pages it has to beat |
| The draft | You, or the AI, about two hours | Section by section, from the blueprint. The parts only you know stay yours |
| The launch list, the forum hour, the receipts | You | You. No tool does this |
| The ledger | Search Console and a sheet, an hour a month | Rankings tracked over the map, per topic |
One month, in hours. Three pages at two hours of writing each: six. Three launches at half an hour: one and a half. Four forum hours: four. One planning hour: one. One maintenance slot: half an hour. Thirteen hours in a month, a little over three a week, for three finished pages, a launched topic and a ledger you can read. The by-hand version of the map adds a day per theme on top, once, and a few hours a quarter after that. That is the whole cost of running the method alone. Thirteen scheduled hours happen. Thirteen "when I get to it" hours do not.
Worked example: the monthly routine, added up
Setting up the routine
- Put the five slots in the calendar before anything else. First Monday, one writing block a week, publish days, a forum hour, last Friday. Recurring. The routine lives or dies here.
- Build the map once, by hand or with the tool. Steps 2 and 3 are the one-off. Everything after runs off the map.
- In the planning hour, read the ledger first and the map second. Which topic produced enquiries decides which topic gets the month's three pages.
- In the writing block, start from the blueprint, never from a blank page. Writing with AI has the split. Your two hours go on the blue boxes.
- Run the launch list the same day the page goes live. Half an hour. If it slips a week it slips forever.
- Keep the forum hour even in a bad week. It is the one slot that compounds without you noticing, and the one that is easiest to skip.
- Once a quarter, replace the maintenance slot with the prune afternoon. Then re-sort the map and start the next quarter.
When you need this, and when you don't
You need the routine if you are the only person doing this, whether you run a shop or you are the marketing department of one. It is built for someone with customers to serve, which is why the numbers are small and the slots are fixed.
You don't need a team, a workflow tool or a content calendar app. A calendar with five recurring slots and the map on one sheet is the entire system. If you run it for clients, the next page changes three things and keeps the rest.
Next
- Next page: Running topic-first SEO for clients. Same method, three differences.
- Where the tool takes the gray boxes off your hands: How it works. Topic-first SEO from $7 for the first 14 days: Pricing.
- If you would rather hand over the whole routine: Done for you.