I used to be an in-house SEO manager working with a well-resourced media team, a real budget, and serious effort going into content. It sucked because none of it was compounding. The portfolio was losing traffic despite everything we threw at it. New pages flatlined. Updates had no impact. And I couldn't figure out why. I was too buried in execution to think. Keyword research, content briefs, technical fixes, my job was feeding the machine. Every day. But then I started giving the repetitive stuff to AI. Not all at once. Just the pieces where it could speed things up. Within a few months I'd automated most of the repetitive work on my plate. I finally had space to actually think. I dove deep into the data. Ran analyses I'd never had time for. That's when I found it, something fundamental we'd been getting wrong. Our content was great. Our site architecture was broken. Everything we published was landing on a flawed foundation. I put together a theory and tested it on one of our smaller sites. Within two weeks, we saw significant ranking improvements on the tested money pages. We thought it was a fluke. We tested on three more sites. Same thing. Two weeks in, pages that got the treatment shot up. Pages that didn't stayed flat. It was real. We rolled it out to the entire portfolio. A few weeks later, we started seeing traffic and rankings shooting up. All because AI took the repetitive execution off my plate and gave me back the one thing that actually matters, time to think. We grew organic traffic from 160k to 1.7 million on one site. The peak hit after I'd already left. The system I built was still compounding on its own. It's been declining since. The system works, but only if someone's running it.

Would like to know how to long would it take someone to learn how to build n8n automations that could replicate what an SEO agency does. Is there any way the backlink part can be automated?

I 2x'd sign-ups to a SaaS client's landing page. Purely from Organic traffic. In about 90 days. If you got one hour of my time, what would you want help with?