Less than most people fear, and more than most agencies admit. Budget roughly half a day a week from one person for access, review and sign-off, plus a few hours a month from whoever holds the subject expertise. The expert time is the constraint, and it is the one worth protecting.
The short version
- Roughly half a day a week from one owner, once things are running.
- A few hours a month from whoever genuinely knows the subject. This is the real constraint.
- Month one is heavier: access, data and answering questions about the business.
- Developer time is needed in bursts, not continuously.
- If the expert time is not available, say so at the start. It changes what is realistic.
Why this question matters more than the fee
Small teams ask this before they ask about price, and they are right to. A programme that needs more from you than you can give does not half-work. It stalls, and you pay for the months it spends stalled.
The honest breakdown, for a business doing this properly rather than nominally:
Month one is the heaviest. Access to analytics, Search Console, the CMS and whatever else holds the truth. Then a genuine conversation about the business: what you sell, who to, what makes you different, which claims you can substantiate. Expect several hours across the month, mostly from one person, plus a couple of longer sessions. This front-loading is deliberate. A programme built on assumptions instead of answers produces content that sounds like everyone else.
Months two onward settle. Roughly half a day a week from one owner covers review, sign-off, supplying facts and keeping the agency unblocked. It is not continuous work. It is a handful of short interruptions that are easy to absorb if one person owns them and impossible if they are spread across four people who each think somebody else is handling it.
Expert time is the part that cannot be substituted. Somewhere between two and four hours a month from whoever actually knows the subject. Not writing, necessarily. Answering questions, correcting drafts, and supplying the specifics that make content citable. An agency can write around a subject. It cannot invent the detail that makes a model treat you as a source, and content without that detail is content nobody cites.
Developer time comes in bursts. Schema, structured data, crawler access and rendering fixes are a defined piece of work early on, then occasional. If your development sits with an external agency, the practical constraint is usually their ticket queue rather than the hours.
How to check it yourself
Before committing, answer three questions honestly:
- Who is the single owner? Name a person, not a team. Programmes with a named owner run. Programmes owned by a department do not.
- Can that person give half a day a week? Not in an ideal month. In a bad one.
- Will your subject experts give two to four hours a month? Ask them, rather than assuming on their behalf. This is where most programmes quietly fail.
If the answer to the third is no, that is not a reason to abandon the idea. It is a reason to scope differently: more structural and technical work, which needs little of your time, and less content-led authority building, which needs a lot.
What to do about it
- Name one owner and give them the half day.
- Book the expert time as recurring calendar slots rather than hoping it materialises.
- Front-load the awkward questions in month one, while attention is high.
- Establish the developer route early, especially if development is outsourced.
- Tell your agency the truth about capacity. A programme scoped for time you do not have is worse than a smaller one scoped for time you do. Any agency that does not ask this question before quoting is not planning to deliver.
Our own onboarding is built around this, which is why it starts with a structured questionnaire rather than a kick-off call: it collects the business context asynchronously, in your time, instead of consuming an afternoon.