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Just got laid off as a Content Creator/SEO, is this normal in marketing and how to stsy relevant?
Posted by on March 27, 2026 at 5:27 pmHi,
I recently got laid off from my role as a Content Creator/SEO. I was doing remote work and had been planning to continue that. Before my layoff, I was managing a few clients, creating one SEO-optimized text per month per client. Previously, I had more clients, but some were lost as the company faced financial challenges.
While I was meeting all my deliverables and maintaining client satisfaction, the company informed me that they needed to reduce costs and focus on higher-priority services.
Interestingly, the developer and the designer were also let go, despite doing their work correctly. From what I can tell, this seems more about financial and strategic decisions rather than performance issues.
I’m trying to understand if this is common in marketing, especially for roles that are mostly execution (not management). Is it normal for companies to lay off content creators or SEO specialists when the client workload decreases, even if the employee is doing their job well?
I’d love to hear your experiences or advice, especially from people who’ve worked in marketing agencies or startups.
Thanks! -
1 Reply
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I am afraid so… with a bad donkey n8n automation and a dedicated customer (one that wants to rank) you can create 600 quality, unique and helpful pages in 12 hours.
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That’s not SEO
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Content creation is now a commodity, and extremely cheap to produce.
There’s no future in it. AI has wiped away the skill for design, writing and a ton of other skills.
What AI cannot do is actual authority growth. It can help you craft a plan, and even help with outreach. But it cannot build links.
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Any role that’s purely content writing without any value addition is either obsolete or will soon be obsolete thanks to…. you guessed right…
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Copywriting is the thing AI is decimating the fastest. Writing is now something where you edit AI output instead of writing from scratch. I suspect your career needs a bit of a pivot.
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AI is gonna decimate the seo/web dev industry
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So… you delivered one blog page a month to clients?
That doesn’t sound like it meaningfully impacts business.
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Was it because you don’t know how to use paragraphs? 😂
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Yes, it has nothing to do with your job or performance. Company just moved on and killed some projects.
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I don’t even know of many people in my spheres that are JUST doing creation or anything like that anymore.
Granted, I work in Influencer Marketing, so we mostly rely on content creators for contract work. However even my creative team isn’t just publishing a blog post or two a month. That would be one small part of their workload for a couple days.
Most people in my organization are account directors/supervisors/managers. Meaning we are leading entire programs/projects with 1-5 people depending on the scale of the program. I haven’t seen someone be hired to support on creative tasks for one single project in a very long time now.
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Others are mentioning other things, but I’ll take a stab at your question.
It depends on your agency. At my previous agency (marketing) and my current agency (product) if we’re between projects then we’re benched. That means we work on prof dev or internal projects. This is only temporary and lasts until we onboard a new client.
If the pipeline is dry then the company has already been laying off people and you’re likely going to get laid off instead of benched. A dry pipeline is a very bad sign.
At other agencies if there’s a gap between your last engagement and onboarding a new client, yes, you might be getting laid off as a first move.
Copywriters still have jobs, but AI is taking a big bite from that market. Do you have any authoring experience? Like authoring in SiteCore or Adobe products, that kind of authoring?
If you have that skill, then you can leverage that into a career.
Did you do content design where you found the opportunities, analyzed the competition, found the weaknesses, and then put together a content piece to target it? If so, make sure you’re highlighting that in your portfolio. That can also be leveraged into a career.
What I read about your work does not sound like SEO, it sounds like if marketing automation was manually done. With your SMS marketing work, did you report on open rates, click rates, and conversion rates? If so, get that into your portfolio and maybe look into marketing automation.
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In afraid this is just business nothing to do with SEO. If the company isn’t making money they have to let people go.
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Fellow SEO content person here 👋 I think in these times, businesses are looking for you to not just create a blog post or two, but actually scale content to drive traffic or business outcomes. I have to produce *thousands* of blog articles per quarter at my job. Im not saying that i agree with it, but those are the orders and i think thats the unfortunate new normal.
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Sorry you’re going through a layoff, typical quarterly cycle every marketing position should be expecting, going back 4 decades.
Sounds like your output wasn’t worth the effort to pay you, honestly. LLMs can punch this out in about 10 minutes, while 9 minutes is spent making a coffee.
If you don’t see the writing on the wall, can’t help you, your position is now obsolete. Learn another career.
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