Advanced · Level 3–4 · Tools: Keyword APIs, LLM, CMS, Optional BofuContent
- Business inputs
- Discover competitors
- Find high-intent keywords
- Score opportunities
- Research
- Create
- Publish
- Monitor
BOFU stands for bottom of the funnel: searches from people who are close to buying, like "X alternatives", "X vs Y" or "X pricing". This workflow finds those searches in your market and helps you build accurate pages for them.
Imagine someone searching for the best alternatives to your biggest competitor. They've already got a budget and a shortlist. That's one of the most valuable searches in your market, and right now the top answer is probably a review site or the competitor's own page. Small teams often know they should have these pages but keep putting them off, because researching competitors properly takes ages and the details go out of date fast.
At a glance
- What it does: Win the searches people make when they're close to buying: alternatives, comparisons, reviews, pricing and best-of lists.
- Difficulty: Advanced. Lots of moving parts, and real damage if it goes wrong. Save it until you've run simpler workflows for a while.
- Automation level: Level 3–4 on the levels of SEO automation. In plain words: anything from AI helping with judgement calls (Level 3) up to an AI agent choosing some of its own next steps (Level 4), depending on how far you take it.
- Steps: 8, from "Business inputs" to "Monitor".
What you'll need
Tools
- Keyword APIs: services that hand keyword ideas and search volumes to software, such as DataForSEO.
- LLM: a large language model, the kind of AI behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
- CMS: the system you publish pages with, like WordPress or Webflow.
- Optional BofuContent: an optional tool built specifically for bottom-of-funnel SEO content, if you'd rather not assemble the pieces yourself.
What goes in
- What you sell, who it's for, and how you're different
- A list of known competitors
- Keyword data for your market
- Current competitor facts: pricing, features and plans
What comes out
- A list of high-intent keywords
- Scored opportunities
- Researched comparison and alternatives pages
- Published pages with ongoing checks
How it works, step by step
- Business inputs. You describe what you sell, who it's for, and where you're genuinely better or worse than others.
- Discover competitors. It finds the companies that show up in search for your core terms, including ones you hadn't thought of.
- Find high-intent keywords. For each competitor, it looks for searches like alternatives, versus, reviews, pricing and best-of lists.
- Score opportunities. Each keyword is scored on search volume, how ready to buy the searcher seems, and whether you can honestly say something useful.
- Research. It gathers current facts on each competitor: plans, prices, features and what reviewers say.
- Create. AI drafts the page from that research and your positioning, with a clear, fair comparison.
- Publish. After review, the page goes live in your CMS.
- Monitor. It tracks rankings and sign-ups, and re-checks competitor facts on a schedule so pages don't go stale.
A worked example
Say you make a scheduling app for small clinics. The workflow finds 25 competitors and about 300 high-intent keywords. "Competitor A alternatives" and "Competitor A vs Competitor B" score highest: steady searches, and you have a clear angle, because you're cheaper for clinics with fewer than ten staff.
The research step pulls Competitor A's current pricing page and notes they raised prices last month. The draft includes that, the reviewer confirms it against the live pricing page, and the page goes live. Three months later, the monitoring step notices Competitor A has added a new plan and opens a task to update your page.
Where AI helps, and where it doesn't
- Finding high-intent keyword patterns across dozens of competitors.
- Turning competitor pricing and feature pages into consistent notes.
- Drafting a fair, well-structured comparison from those notes.
This is where AI is most dangerous. It will happily state a competitor's price or feature from old training data, and a wrong claim about a named company costs you trust, or worse. Every factual claim about another company needs a current source.
What to keep human
- Someone checks every claim about a competitor against their current website.
- A person signs off on how you describe your own strengths, so you don't overclaim.
For more on deciding how much to hand over, see the SEO autonomy dial and what not to automate.
What can go wrong
- Pages turn into generic comparison fluff that doesn't help anyone choose.
- Competitor prices or features change, and your page keeps showing old, wrong information.
Start small
Pick one competitor and build one page: an alternatives page for that competitor. Automate only the research step, pulling their current pricing and feature pages into a summary, and write the page yourself. Once that works, add keyword discovery and scoring for more competitors.