I switched from doing my own keyword research to auto-keyword research

https://preview.redd.it/tlhbuz98svkg1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=c4f0759de234ae7e4cd611f119bd20a119a7cf2c

I started doing SEO for my SaaS with zero background in the subject. I understood a little about basic seo setup, like adding a sitemap, robot.txt file etc, but with a non-technical background most of those came from sitting with GPT for a while and figuring things out. When it came to actual keyword research, sifting through real data on ahrefs, understanding how to match keyword to the correct type of web page or blog post, i was asking gpt questions but was getting inconsistent answers.

Also, i'm not a writer. its never been something i was good at and it doesn't come naturally to me. my studies were primarily in a second language so putting deep dive blog posts in english was always a weak spot.

I decided to use one of those auto blog generating tools, that does the keyword research in the background and just spits out a full article to copy onto my SaaS's blog page. But the worst part about using this tool was the price, $97 a month. that was for about 30 blog posts, some backlink exchange, and a few other perks.. By SaaS was barely above $200 mrr and i wasn't sure if the returns on such a high investment would be worth it.

I tried vibecoding my own blog generator and connect some basic scraping API's to do keyword research but after 3-4 weeks of constant generation i didn't see much. I decided to test another blog generator, which was a lot cheaper. bottom line is this one did pretty much the same thing but had a lot more external links, and followed E-E-A-T guidelines (which i learnt about later than i should have). the articles appeared a lot more professional, and it attached relevant youtube videos in the article as well. for keywords it scraped reddit posts and youtube reviews as well as perplexity search results. recently they added 'geo' optimization, but i've seen mixed feeling all over reddit wether thats actually a thing. i'll probably have to use some ai visibility tool to check if its actually made a difference.