How Local SEO Agencies Can Cut Content Costs by 80% Without Compromising Quality

For SEO agencies, content is both the lifeblood and the bottleneck.
This agency—serving local SEO clients across multiple sectors—had a 10-person writing team that couldn’t keep up. Writers were behind schedule, overworked, and leaving faster than they could be replaced. Deadlines slipped, campaigns stalled, and growth flatlined.

The Problem

The content operation was collapsing under its own weight.

• The writing team was constantly behind schedule

• High churn meant endless cycles of recruiting and training

• SEO leads spent more time managing people than executing strategy

• Existing clients weren’t getting deliverables on time, and new clients had to wait

Each article depended on too many manual steps—brief creation, keyword research, writing, link insertion, QA, and uploads. Quality varied, and deadlines were missed.

The business needed scale, not more hiring.

The Transformation

We started by dissecting the entire content pipeline, from client intake to publication.
Then, piece by piece, we automated everything that could be automated—without cutting corners.

The new system automatically:

• Drafted content to precise specs: length, tone, and voice

• Embedded internal and external links

• Added legal and formatting compliance checks

• Ran plagiarism scans and inserted stock images

• Delivered polished drafts directly into a built-in editor—no more GDrive chaos

At the heart of it all was a bespoke automation platform built with a React front end, Inngest for orchestration, and integrations with SERP and plagiarism APIs.
Every article now flowed through a single, intelligent pipeline—guided by context and customised for each client.

The remaining content team became editors, not producers—spending their time refining content that was already 95% complete.

The Results

In just one month, the system went from concept to deployment.
Two years later, it still delivers as powerfully as day one.

• Headcount reduced by 80%

• Over $100,000 saved annually in content costs

• Consistent on-time delivery for all clients

• Capacity to take on more clients without hiring

• Higher content quality and faster results

The bottleneck turned into a growth engine. Deadlines stopped being a source of stress—and became a sign of reliability.

My Role

I led a full-day discovery process with the SEO leadership team to map the existing system and define what “quality” truly meant.
Then I architected and built the automation platform end-to-end—designing the workflow, choosing the tech stack, and implementing the integrations.

The key was precision. We didn’t automate for automation’s sake—we automated what mattered, maintaining editorial quality while freeing the team to scale.