How much time do you spend on SEO?

If you include creating the content...about 6-9 hours per week.

seeing as this project is a side hustle/project right now 4-6 hrs on the weekend

Not just 4-6 hours. But sometimes even we have to do more work to fulfill the job to the fullest. It didn't seem that simple. we become what we behold. We must always make things new.

When you do some work on your pages per week you have to wait some considerable time for Google to test, retest over and over your seo. If you keep going in every week then how does this help Google evaluate your ranking, it doesn’t. You’d be better to work on your pages then wait 2-3 months to see where you are. The weakest link is Google who’ll drag their feet here.

Lately i've been spending quite a bit. More so learning about it than improving on it, fairly new to it still. Just finished up learning about backlinks and link building