Beginner · Level 1–3 · Tools: Ahrefs/Semrush/DataForSEO, Sheets, n8n
- Select competitors
- Pull keyword sets
- Diff gaps
- Score opportunities
- Create briefs or tasks
A keyword gap is a search your competitors show up for and you don't. This workflow pulls those lists automatically, clears out the noise, and hands you a short, ranked list of opportunities.
Most marketers know the moment: you search for something your product does well, and three competitors show up but you don't. Doing a proper gap analysis by hand means exporting keyword lists from an SEO tool, pasting them into a spreadsheet and deduplicating thousands of rows. It's easy to do once and then never again. Automating it means you can rerun it every quarter and see what's new.
At a glance
- What it does: Find the competitor keywords actually worth going after, and put them in order.
- Difficulty: Beginner. A good first project. A no-code tool and a few connected accounts are usually enough.
- Automation level: Level 1–3 on the levels of SEO automation. In plain words: anything from single tasks on a schedule (Level 1) up to AI helping with judgement calls (Level 3), depending on how far you take it.
- Steps: 5, from "Select competitors" to "Create briefs or tasks".
What you'll need
Tools
- Ahrefs/Semrush/DataForSEO: any one of these SEO data providers, which estimate the keywords a site ranks for. See Ahrefs, Semrush and DataForSEO.
- Sheets: Google Sheets or any spreadsheet, used as a simple shared database.
- n8n: a workflow tool that connects your apps by dragging boxes around, so you don't need to write code. See n8n.
What goes in
- Three to five real search competitors
- Keyword data for your site and theirs
- A short description of what you sell and who it's for
What comes out
- A deduplicated list of gap keywords
- An opportunity score for each one
- Content briefs or tasks for the best few
How it works, step by step
- Select competitors. You choose three to five sites that compete with you in search. They aren't always the same as your business competitors.
- Pull keyword sets. It pulls the keywords each competitor ranks for, plus your own, from an SEO data tool.
- Diff gaps. It lists keywords where they rank on the first two pages of results and you don't rank at all, or rank far lower.
- Score opportunities. Each gap gets a score based on search volume, how hard it looks to rank, and how closely it matches what you sell.
- Create briefs or tasks. The top-scoring gaps become content briefs or tasks in your team's tracker.
A worked example
Say you sell accounting software for freelancers. The workflow pulls 4,000 gap keywords from three competitors. Half are about payroll for large companies, which you don't do, so the relevance check filters them out.
Of what's left, "invoice template for freelancers" and "how to track business expenses as a freelancer" score highest: decent search volume and a clear fit. They go into your sheet as two new brief requests. The whole thing reruns on the first Monday of each quarter.
Where AI helps, and where it doesn't
- Grouping thousands of keywords into a handful of topics.
- Judging roughly how well each keyword matches what you sell.
- Drafting a first content brief for the winners.
AI doesn't know your business priorities. It can't tell that you're about to drop a product line, or that sales wants more enterprise leads. Treat its relevance scores as a first sort, not a decision.
What to keep human
- A person checks the top of the list for business relevance before anything becomes a task.
For more on deciding how much to hand over, see the SEO autonomy dial and what not to automate.
What can go wrong
- You end up chasing keywords a competitor ranks for that have nothing to do with your customers.
Start small
Do it in a spreadsheet first. Export keywords for yourself and two competitors from Ahrefs, Semrush or DataForSEO, and use a simple lookup formula to list the ones only they have. Once you know which columns you actually use, automate the export and filtering in n8n.