Do you know how long it will take to write content for your next website?
First we’ll walk through the roles involved in creating content for a B2B website with pretty extensive content, then you’ll see them entered into the calculator. Change the numbers to see how each participant and the number of pages affects your time requirements.
The calculator will get you in the ballpark. In Part 2, we’ll explore factors that can affect your project. Using that, you can dial-in your estimates and use them for project planning.
But how did we get those numbers? Read on…
Step 1: Count Pages
Grab your sitemap. Let’s pretend it’s this one for a fictitious mid-size B2B company with plenty services and products on offer:
We’ll assume we can exclude archived time-based content such as press releases and events information, and also our leadership bios that can be imported from the old site. Everything else should get a re-write.
Here’s our inventory:
- Home Page
- 7 top level pages
- 17 Product detail pages
- 11 Service detail pages
- 3 About sub-pages (Community Service, Culture, Privacy & Disclosure)
- 3 Careers sub-pages (Working at ClientCo, Benefits, Scholarships)
Total: 42 pages.
Step 2: Add People
A typical authoring workflow looks like this; we assume a fairly lean project team: Writer, Subject Matter Expert, SEO Analyst and Web Developer.
- Subject Matter Experts, or SMEs, are vital to great content. These range from product managers to human resources recruiters to VPs who’ve taken an interest in your website re-design.
- Your Writer will read and integrate all existing background material, then will interview your SMEs to learn the real deal. The writer then creates the intial draft, sends it to the same SMEs to provide feedback, revises and sends the update to the SME for approval. With an experienced writer and on-point SMEs, you’ll usually only need one revision round.
- Your SEO Analyst will also need to be in the process from the start – before even the first draft of content is written. The SEO analyst does the keyword & content research, creates phrase variants, reviews them with your SME, then revises them using search volume and SERP data, then send the final list to the SME for approval. Only then does it go to the writer for use in creating the first draft of content.
(Aside: The SEO Analyst’s per-page time does not include intial background research, which cannot be skimped on. Really, don’t try to drive a hard bargain on those hours; that’s where a great SEO Analyst really adds value.) - A web developer usually loads the content into the CMS and make sure it looks as good as it reads. Your SME will need to approve the staged pages before they are published. (If you’ve hired , you can drop the web developer from this time estimate, as we have already factored this into your project budget.)
The Calculator has starting values based on our sample page inventory, and typical times for writer, subject matter expert and SEO analyst. We’ve set the web developer to zero because that’s usually handled by your agency, i.e., . More robust projects may have an editor-in-chief that ensures continuity of style across writers, although this often falls to the project manager.
You may want to make your own version of the workflow map based on your organization’s style. For example, if the pages must be reviewed by Marketing and Product Management and Sales, you’ll want to account both for their time and for the extra revision time required by the writer.
Add ’em up
Based on our content authoring workflow:
- Writer: 4.5 hours/page
- SME: 1.5 hours/page
- SEO Analyst: 1 hour/page
- Web Developer: 1 hour/page
And multiply that by the number of pages in your sitemap. Boom.
But wait, there’s more…
In Part 2: Your mileage will vary
In Part 2, we’ll dive into factors that can affect the time requirements. We’ll be advised by two of ’s long-time content collaborators, Jamie Wallace and Susan Preiss.
Feedback, please!
Did you find that it took much longer to write content? Or that it went much faster? Give me a shout at @imarcagency or robert@imarc.com. I’d like to know what varied, so I can improve these estimates and make a better calculator!
