24/7
If you take breaks google might release an update that can screw your site. If google doesn't screw your site, your competitors will outrank you.
SEO is a non-stop process, it doesn't end after you build the site, you need to constantly....
- publish content
- build links
- promote the site in other ways (social media, YT, forums, UGC sites, etc)
- track, monitor, analyze everything that's going on with your: rankings, pages, backlinks, keywords, traffic
- stay up-to-date by following the latest SEO news and discoveries by reading up on forum topics, watching YT clips, running A/B or SEO tests, etc
1 article a day should be enough in the beginning. If you target the right keywords and don't get sandboxed for 6-9 months (the usual sandbox period) you're going to "gain traction" within weeks...
Although, since you're having a gaming website, I think mixing it up with YT both ways (drive traffic from YT to your site, and from your blog posts to your YT vids) is a much better approach than publishing boring walls of text that (most likely) the gamers will never read.
I am a gamer myself, and I also watch tons of YT clips on various games, and I can tell you from first-hand experience (both as a gamer and as an ex-site owner) that when it comes to gaming, I will choose watching YT clips over reading blog posts 90% of the time
this question has no answer, because....
1) each niche, each site, and each keyword is treated almost differently, so it depends on all of these, and it also depends on your competition
2) there is a thing in SEO that's called sandbox, and it happens quite often (especially for fresh domains), and if you get sandboxed you might not rank for anywhere from 3 months all the way up to 2 years (although, 2 years is a long time, I've not seen any site being sandboxed for so long lately... so, if you're getting sandboxed it's possible that you won't see a single click and visitor for 3-9 months)
3) we don't know what "decent rankings" means for you. For some people, decent rankings is top 10, for others it's top 3, etc... Also, just because you might rank top 3 it doesn't mean that your traffic will be good, high, or both (google does regulate the traffic and sometimes they send more and better traffic to pages / sites they like even if those pages / sites rank #9 or #10, while #1 ranked sites might get nothing. It doesn't happen all the time... or even frequently, but it does happen, so "decent rankings" doesn't mean anything anymore. Just focus on increasing your ranked pages and keywords gradually over years, and getting as much highly converting traffic - with or without google - as you can, and eventually you will get where you want to be... unless you're competing with big gaming sites, if you target keywords that those sites are ranking for and if google favors those sites... well... I don't see you ranking over them anytime soon
I've never owned gaming sites, so I wouldn't know what to say besides what I said earlier: mix your blogging site with YT clips. You said you have a team of 6 people creating content, that's more than enough to be able to crank out at least 2-3 YT clips and 4-5 articles per week for at least 6-7 months until - I predict - you will manage to establish a constant flow of traffic.
But other than this, I don't know what else to recommend.... maybe the usual and boring
p ) SEO tips like keep publishing content, keep building quality links (few of them per week initially, but consistently), get your technical and on-page SEO right. have good CWV and speed scores, mobile friendliness, etc...
