How many minutes a day do you spend checking keywords?
I probably average 2 minutes a day now. It used to be wake-up, make coffee, d/l the logs, and 1-2 hours of checking rankings. What a waste of the best time of day for the brain. If you’re still doing this you don’t have enough websites.
Brett over at WW posted a few years ago that mostly all he did was check referrers. I thought, man, that’s nuts or he’s lying. Now I get it. And checking referrers for a real estate site is quick–work and really reminds you of where your efforts need to be focused for the long haul. Filling that list with authority sites that sometimes beat out the search engines in daily referrals is the goal.
When do I check keywords now?
-New website/occasional page, fun to see it Hello World into the SERPs
-Blog posts/comments, interesting to watch these days, ranking can be counted in seconds sometimes
-When Google (sometimes Y!/MSN) makes a move that makes it on to the forums. Then if nothing’s moving on my main terms, it’s back-to-work. If there’s major movement on keyphrases that haven’t budged often over the years, then perhaps it’s worth throwing a few hours at it.
When juggling RE & SEM, it’s all about shaving time off of compounding daily tasks that must be done. If you’re averaging more than a few minutes a day checking keywords these days, you probably don’t have enough posts/comments/websites/clients to respond to. Psst, it’s not all about anchor text anymore anyway. 