Roughly 20 to 30 hours to set up, then 6 to 10 hours a month to sustain. Those numbers assume you know your own business well, which you do, and that you are not learning to write from scratch, which you might be.
Here is where the hours actually go, because the setup number surprises nobody and the ongoing number is the one people get wrong.
Setup: 20 to 30 hours
Measuring where you stand: 3 to 4 hours. Ten prompts, three or four engines, recorded properly with two columns for named and cited, repeated across a few days because these systems vary. Most of this is the discipline of writing it down rather than the asking.
Auditing your citation sources: 4 to 6 hours. Finding which directories, registers and review platforms your category actually runs on. This is research, and it is the part where most people stop too early: the obvious general listings are not the high-weight ones in most industries.
Claiming and completing them: 8 to 12 hours. The single biggest block, and the most tedious. Each source is a form, often a verification step, sometimes a phone call. Details must be identical across all of them.
Fixing your own pages: 5 to 8 hours. Not rewriting the site. Restructuring the handful of pages that answer real buyer questions so the answer comes first.
You can spread this over a month. You cannot skip the claiming block, which is the one people try to skip.
Ongoing: 6 to 10 hours a month
Monitoring: 1 to 2 hours. Re-running your prompts and recording the result. Weekly is too often, and produces noise rather than signal. Fortnightly is about right.
Writing: 4 to 6 hours. One or two genuinely useful pages a month, answering questions you actually get asked. This is the biggest ongoing block and the first thing to go when the month is busy.
Maintaining listings: 1 hour. Details change, listings go stale, new sources appear.
Everything else: an hour. Responding to reviews, keeping an eye on what competitors are doing.
The part nobody budgets
The context switch. Six hours a month is not one six-hour block, it is a dozen half-hours spread across weeks, and every one of them costs more than its length because you have to remember where you were.
This is the honest reason DIY efforts stall at around week twelve. It is not that the work is hard or that six hours is a lot. It is that six fragmented hours competing with running a business loses most months, and losing three months in a row makes the whole thing feel like it failed rather than like it paused.
If you are planning to do this yourself, the useful thing is not to budget the hours. It is to decide in advance which existing thing you are going to stop doing, and to put the work in one recurring block rather than in the gaps.
What that time is worth
At a notional $100 an hour for your own time, setup is $2,000 to $3,000 and ongoing is $600 to $1,000 a month. That is a real number and it usually compares favorably with the alternative, which is why we tell people with a capable marketer to do it themselves.
It compares badly when the hours do not exist. Six hours a month you do not have is not cheaper than paying someone, it is zero hours a month and a flat chart.
The shortcut that actually works
If you have limited time, spend it entirely on the citation and listing work and skip the content for now.
It is the least enjoyable part and the highest-value one, it is finite rather than ongoing, and it is the thing most likely to move the number in the first few weeks because the models re-read those sources often. Content compounds and matters more over a year, but if you have twelve hours total, put all twelve into listings.
The twenty hours most people spend badly
The hours above assume you spend them on the right things. Most DIY efforts do not, and the pattern is consistent enough to name.
Ten hours on the website. Rewriting the homepage, restructuring navigation, adding schema markup to pages nobody retrieves. This feels productive because the output is visible. It moves almost nothing, because a model reading your site was never the constraint.
Six hours on the wrong listings. Google Business Profile, claimed properly, then a handful of general directories everyone else has also claimed. The category-specific registers, which is where the differentiation actually is, get skipped because they are harder to find.
Four hours on volume. Publishing more pages of the kind that are already not working, on the theory that the problem is quantity.
The fix costs nothing except knowing to do it: spend the first two hours measuring, so the remaining eighteen are aimed. A measured baseline tells you whether you are cited but not named, which is a completely different job from not being read at all.
What the time buys when it is aimed correctly
“We've always grown through referrals - builders who know us pass our name on. That works, but it only reaches people who already know someone in the industry. Within a couple of weeks of the content going live, we had someone contact us directly through the website. That's a channel we didn't have before - and the enquiries have kept coming.
PROCERT is a building certification firm that had grown entirely on referrals. Within a couple of weeks of the work going live, someone who had never met them inquired directly through the website. Fur Magic went from absent to the most-cited brand in their category in three weeks, ahead of long-established competitors.
Both published with the starting number, the end number and the period: PROCERT and Fur Magic.
A worked example of where the hours went
A marketing coordinator who tracked their own time across a first quarter.
Hours 1 to 3: measurement. Ten questions, three engines, logged out, recorded. The most valuable three hours of the quarter, because everything afterwards was aimed by them.
Hours 4 to 9: finding the sources. Not a directory checklist. Reading the citations under their own test answers and working backwards. Found seven sources, four of which they had never heard of.
Hours 10 to 21: claiming. The longest and least interesting block. Two needed phone calls. One needed documents posted. Four were forms. Most of the elapsed time was waiting rather than working.
Hours 22 to 33: four pages. About three hours each, mostly because the answers already existed in sales emails and needed editing rather than writing.
Hours 34 to 36: re-measurement and one external pitch.
Total: 36 hours across thirteen weeks, roughly three hours a week.
What they would do differently. Start the external pitching in week two rather than week twelve, because it has the longest lead time and it was the only workstream with nothing to show at the end of the quarter.
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Ashur Homa
Built and scaled a digital brand to $100M+ in sales with zero ad spend. Has helped businesses generate millions through AI go-to-market strategy. Leads growth at Omni Eclipse.
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