When it comes to doing SEO for your website, one of the major concerns you may have is how much time and money you'll need to spend on it. If you're hiring an SEO firm, then time IS money, and you'll want to know a rough estimate of how much time the SEO firm will put in and, therefore, charge you for.
You can break down the steps necessary for SEO work, making it easier to judge how much time you or your SEO company will need to spend on each. The estimates given here do not take into account any major issues or technical problems that may arise. You may want to add in a few extra hours to each step to account for any problems that you may have to deal with. If your website is exceptionally large (a thousand pages or more), you may also want to add more time into your estimate.