I spent 10+ hours a week on SEO manually. Now it's zero.

3 months ago my weekly seo routine looked like this:

→ open ahrefs, research keywords for an hour
→ figure out which ones my site could actually rank for based on DR
→ spend 3-4 hours writing one article
→ hunt for relevant images and youtube videos
→ add citations from real sources
→ build internal links to existing pages
→ make sure it follows E-E-A-T guidelines
→ manually publish to my site

repeat 3-4 times a week. as a solo founder with a 9-5, it was killing me. so i started building a system to automate the whole thing piece by piece.

keyword research: the biggest time sink was finding keywords i could actually compete for. most tools show you popular keywords but don't care about your domain rating. a DR 10 site targeting the same keywords as a DR 60 site is just wasting time.

my system checks the site's DR first, then only surfaces keywords within a realistic difficulty range. it also pulls in:

→ keywords you already rank for on pages 8-30 (low hanging fruit)
→ competitor keywords they rank for that you don't
→ growth keywords in your niche you haven't tapped yet

it auto-refreshes the keyword calendar every 30 days so there's always a pipeline.

content generation: this was the part i wanted to get right. not just ai slop but articles that actually follow what google rewards:

→ proper internal links connecting to existing pages
→ relevant images and youtube videos embedded
→ citations from real authoritative sources
→ E-E-A-T compliance built into the structure
→ unique content, not rehashed summaries

publishing: articles auto-publish to the site through a webhook or cms integration. i can review and edit before publishing or just let it run.

results so far: one article ranked #1 on google in 3 weeks. the whole system runs on autopilot. now. i check in once a week out of curiosity.

the biggest shift wasn't the traffic. it was getting my time back. those 10+ hours a week now go into actually building the product.

i ended up turning it into a full product — seoladders.com. it handles the entire pipeline: keyword research matched to your DR, writes and publishes articles with proper internal links, citations, images, and E-E-A-T compliance.
auto-publishes on a schedule.

if you're a solo founder spending too much time on SEO content, you can try it out — i'm running 50% off the first month with code REDDIT50.

curious what other founders here are doing for SEO content anyone else automated their workflow or still doing it manually?