The AI SEO workflow that drove 10x growth in 8 weeks

Whenever people tell me that they're afraid to share something because they think they're giving away too much, I always scoff and tell them it's silly to worry about that.

But now it's my turn to be the one who's afraid to share!

I have put over 300 hours into this AI SEO workflow by now and I keep asking myself if maybe I shouldn't keep it to myself because it's genuinely overpowered— eg, it drove a 10x increase in search impressions and ~50% increase in traffic in about eight weeks:

But I'm going to take my advice and share the whole thing here because why not?

For context, this is for my company Nail The Mix— we teach people how to produce music in the modern metal genre, and my strategy is to saturate the niche and become the number one source of high-quality articles on these longer tail topics.

It's a pretty small niche where most of the topics have less than 1000 monthly searches and competition isn't too high. So I felt pretty confident about that, especially given that we've been around for about 10 years with an extremely strong brand.

Examples of the content we're creating here, here, and here.

I'm constantly tweaking the workflow and making tiny little improvements. As of now, here's where it stands:

It all starts with this big giant spreadsheet. Click to see the full resolution version, and I'll go through it column-by-column.

KEYWORD

Nothing fancy here. I start with doing keyword research in Ahrefs. SEMrush is also good. There's probably some other options too. I don't think it matters all that much which you use.

BRAINDUMP

Here's the first part of the secret sauce. For each article, we choose what I call a brain dump: a transcription of a 5-10 minute voice memo that’s a raw dump of all our thoughts on a given topic.

This is a critical piece because it's how we make sure that the content of the article is our original IP rather than a regurgitation of the consensus thoughts on a topic, which is what would happen by default if you had an AI write the article.

The drop-down above does a VLOOKUP and pulls in the full text of the brain dump which is stored in another sheet called "context".

FORMAT

This is the second part of the secret sauce: Just a dropdown with a few common different formats: How-to, checklist, do’s and don’ts, product comparison, etc.

This is more powerful than it seems at first glance because the combination of this with the brain dump is exactly what allows us to saturate this niche because it dramatically increases the variety of articles we can make on related keywords by mixing and matching formats and braindumps.

Just picking different options in those dropdowns can give you radically different articles on the same topic with a few seconds of effort:

CONTEXT

And here's the last piece of the special sauce: an optional field that allows me to give it specific direction on particular things to include and overall point of view on the article, et cetera.

This is critical because it gives me almost total control over the direction of the article rather than leaving it up to the RNG of the LLM.

One simple sentence here will yield a completely different article, so it's one more way that we can saturate this niche by creating highly differentiated content around very similar clusters of keywords.

YOUTUBE EMBED

This is another optional field that allows us to include one of our YouTube videos to get embedded in the article.

Google doesn't index these videos because they aren't considered a "watch page," but I think it elevates the experience to have an embedded video and also helps with our authority to see that we've made a super high-quality video on the topic.

IMAGE

This is semi-secret sauce: I have another sheet with a couple hundred thumbnails that I made in MidJourney with a system of prompts that took me a week or two to develop. It was a big lift, but now I can effectively create an unlimited amount of images that are all consistent with our brand (shoutout to Rory Flynn’s guidance on this).

I'll be honest, figuring out the workflow for these was intense - probably took me 50 hours or something alone. But it was worth it because these came out incredibly well IMO. I’m VERY picky about images because of my background as a designer, and I'm really happy with these.

RELATED POSTS & DETAILS

Lastly, we generate a list of related posts, which help with internal links. We put a now() timestamp on it so that I can compare versions if I ever need to. We also generate a link to the final article, so it's easy to access it with one click.

GENERATE THE ARTICLE

I could write a whole other newsletter just about this, but to make a long story short, I use Make to create these articles with Gemini 2.5 Pro for the AI and then save them back into Google Sheets where they get exported as a CSV.

UPLOAD TO WORDPRESS

Lastly, we upload the whole batch of articles to WordPress as a CSV using this utility that our engineer created. There are a lot of off-the-shelf options for this, but there are some specific requirements to our upload process that made it easier for us to just create our own.

That's it! There's actually even more detail I left out, especially about the article creation process. But this is already long as hell, and you guys are probably falling asleep so I'll leave it at that for now.

Let me know what you think of this and how it compares to your workflows— I'm always excited to hear about what other people are doing so we can compare notes and learn from each other!

PS - If you like my emails, reply to this and say hi! I don’t have any room for new clients right now so I have nothing to sell you, but I always like talking with people.