I'm spending $1,100/month on SEO (help me reality-check this)
Okay, so I was checking my expenses some day and had this moment where I'm like... what?
I pay ~$130/month for my SEO tool. Okay. Expected.
But then I started tracking how much TIME I actually spend in there each month. I run a medium size blog (over 200 articles) and a few products with websites. Honest number? About 17 hours/month. Just... digging in tables, comparing keywords, managing lists, trying to figure out the stuff there.
- My roughly estimated hourly rate as a founder: ~$58/hour (I don't pay myself a salary, haha)
- Math: $130 + (17 × $58) = $1,116/month
And after all that spending, SEO is still a guesswork.
I'm STILL not confident when I hit publish. I'm still basically guessing.
Am I doing this wrong? Am I overthinking this or does SEO just naturally take this much time for solo builders? Anyone else feel this way or am I just bad at SEO?
Like, these tools are incredible - SEMRush, Ahrefs, they're powerful. But are they built for agencies and larger teams with dedicated SEO folks? And here I am, a builder trying to wear another hat I don't really want to wear?
Real questions for you all:
- How much time do you actually spend on SEO monthly? (be honest)
- Do you feel like it's worth the time investment?
- If you could only do 1-2 things for SEO and ignore everything else, what would those things be?
Hey [Igor],
I totally get your frustration. Honestly, SEO tools can be overwhelming for solo founders — they’re amazing for data, but not always practical when you’re wearing multiple hats.
From my experience, if you want to simplify SEO and focus on just 1–2 impactful things:
Keep publishing consistent, high-quality content (you’re already doing this with 200+ articles 👏).
Strengthen your backlink profile — this alone can make a big difference in rankings and traffic, even without spending endless hours in tools.
I actually help website owners with off-page SEO (guest posts, contextual backlinks, Web 2.0 blogs) so they don’t have to spend their valuable time digging into spreadsheets.
If you’d like, I can do a quick mini backlink audit for your site and share where improvements can be made, no strings attached.
I’m with you, these tools are built for agencies, not solo builders. What saved me time was using free/lightweight tools for quick checks (Google Search Console + Keywords Everywhere) and skipping the heavy dashboards.
If I had to pick only 2 SEO actions:
Everything else felt like overkill. Do you think you’d be better off cutting SEMRush/Ahrefs and going leaner?
Hey! I'm in the same boat here. Yup.
SEMRush is amazing for monitoring. But if I want to write content - I write it first, optimize later. Never do keyword research before I write.
Actually, built an in-house automation to understand intent, brainstorm keywords (with 5 different AIs), check their SV and KD and then generate SEO metadata and slightly update the text. Works faster for me.
Thinking of breaking up with SEMRush
I feel this a lot. Most solo founders I know spend way too much time in SEO tools because they’re really designed for agencies with whole teams, not one person wearing 10 hats.
From what I’ve seen running sites for clients and my own projects, the 80/20 usually comes down to:
Solid on-page setup (titles, meta, internal links, site speed).
Content that matches search intent.
Backlinks but only after #1 and #2 are dialed in. Even a handful of quality links to the right pages can move rankings much faster than hours of keyword hunting.
Once those are in place, you can scale back on “tool time” and spend more on publishing or growth. For me, I rarely spend more than 5 hours/month in tools anymore.
Curious if you could hand off SEO completely, would you do it, or do you prefer keeping the control?
Hey! Great thoughts. Thank you.
I came to the same conclusions - just write for people, do the basics - and you'll get some results.
Interesting question though!
I think for my low-priority projects when I need to launch fast - I'd hand it off completely. But then return and fine-tune with more manual control.
That 17 hours/month SEO time sink is brutal. Looking at your setup, I see a clear opportunity: your 200+ article blog is essentially a leaky bucket. All that traffic comes, reads, and leaves forever.
The fix: A simple 'SEO-to-email' system where each article captures emails with a relevant lead magnet, then a 3 email sequence nurtures them toward your products.
If you want, I can mock up exactly how this would work for one of your articles show you the lead magnet concept and the first welcome email. Just reply here and I'll send it over.
Hey Meryem,
Appreciate the comment. I've been doing this already.
Smart move , most founders wait too long to set that up. Best of luck with the growth!