AI won't replace content creators (at least for now)

There’s a never ending debate whether AI is killing SEO-traffic. Whereas I am unsure about the exact future, I think that a well-optimized blog post will always drive traffic. We have blog posts that rank well on Google and that show up on Perplexity and post. However, we also have 10+ posts with <100 views. That is why I am now systematically trying to improve our blog posts. It involves;

1. Bringing together Blog Posts, Google Analytics, und Google Console Daten
2. OnPage analysis
3. SEO analysis

I have created an N8N-workflow which you can download here. Here is walk-through:

Bringing together Blog Posts & Google Search Console Data

Our CRM backend for Blog Posts is Strapi and we rely on Google Search Console Data for the performance metricts. Bringing them together in N8N is easy. However, there are a few caveats:

• The merge node only accepts two inputs, so you need to merge over multiple stps
• Google Sheets doesn’t like it when you query to much, thus the wait node
• I still haven’t come around to automating the import of Google Search Console Data
• Long-Term Google Sheet probably isn’t the best solution

Filtering out low performer

Once I have all the data in one sheet, I can start the actual checks. But firstly, I am filtering out low performers. For now this means filtering out articles with < 100 views.

Caveats and outlook:

• 100 views is a random threshold, but I want to use DataForSeo to get a rough estimate of possible views.
• There are some blog posts where I do not expect a lot of views in general because they do not serve SEO-purposes.

OnPage Checks

After filtering out good performing posts, the major part starts: performing the actual onpage checks. A lot of these checks are based on Yoast:

• Do I have enough internal links per post
• Do I have enough external links per post
• High enough keyword density
• Meta Description long enough and SEO-optimized
• Meta Title long enough and SEO-optimized

As a result, I get a traffic light system like in the screenshot.

Optimization

Once I have a hypothesis why certain blogs might be underperforming, the manual work starts: rewriting title, content, adding links etc. There’s for sure a lot of automation potential here as well, but for now my focus on the points above.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of talk about how AI will replace content creators. I do not get this notion at all. I am constantly trying new models and tools for content creation but no tool performs consistently well. As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that OpenAI is hiring for a Content Strategist. However, I think that AI (and related technologies that are “boosted” by AI such as RPA) will have a huge impact on the industry. For now, I think it will mostly impact the before and after part of content creation (research, distribution, curation such a proof-reading, structuring etc.) but not so much the actual value creation part.

Finally, building reliable and repeatable N8N workflows is hard despite what everybody on LinkedIn is saying. What I am doing here barely scratches the surface of what is necessary and it still took my 16 full hours to finalize. I really do not see how "ChatGPT will replace content creators".