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Audit competitor SEO content with Decodo, Gemini, and Google Sheets

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Created by: Atta || attakhalighi
Atta

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Never guess your SEO strategy again.

This advanced workflow automates the most time-consuming part of SEO: auditing competitor articles and identifying exactly where your brand can outshine them. It extracts deep content from top-ranking URLs, compares it against your specific brand identity, and generates a ready-to-use "Action Plan" for your content team.

The workflow uses Decodo for high-fidelity scraping, Gemini 2.5 Flash for strategic gap analysis, and Google Sheets as a dynamic "Brand Brain" and reporting dashboard.

✨ Key Features

  • Brand-Centric Auditing: Unlike generic SEO tools, this engine uses a live Google Sheet containing your Brand Identity to find "Content Gaps" specific to your unique value proposition.
  • Automated SERP Itemization: Converts a simple list of keywords into a filtered list of top-performing competitor URLs.
  • Deep Markdown Extraction: Uses Decodo Universal to bypass bot-blockers and extract clean Markdown content, preserving headers and structure for high-fidelity AI analysis.
  • Structured Action Plans: Outputs machine-readable JSON containing the competitor's H1, their "Winning Factor," and a 1-sentence "Checkmate" instruction for your writers.

⚙️ How it Works

  1. Data Foundation: The workflow triggers (Manual or Scheduled) and pulls your Global Config (e.g., result limits) and Brand Identity from a dedicated Google Sheet.
  2. Market Discovery: It retrieves your target keywords and uses the Decodo Google Search node to identify the top competitors. A Code Node then "itemizes" these results into individual URLs.
  3. Intelligence Harvesting: Decodo Universal scrapes each URL, and an HTML 5 node extracts the body content into Markdown format to minimize token noise for the AI.
  4. Strategic Audit: The AI Content Auditor (powered by Gemini) receives the competitor’s text and your Brand Identity. It identifies what the competitor missed that your brand excels at.
  5. Reporting Deck: The final Strategy Master Writer node appends the analysis—including the "Content Gap" and "Action Plan"—into a master Google Sheet for your marketing team.

📥 Component Installation

This workflow relies on the Decodo node for search and scraping precision.

  1. Install Node: Click the + button in n8n, search for "Decodo," and add it to your canvas.
  2. Credentials: Use your Decodo API key. (Tip: Use a residential proxy setting for difficult sites like Reddit or Stripe).
  3. Gemini: Ensure you have the Google Gemini Chat Model node connected to the AI Agent.

🛠️ Setup Instructions

1. Google Sheets Configuration

Create a spreadsheet with the following three tabs:

  • Target Keywords: One column named Target Keyword.
  • Brand Identity: One cell containing your brand mission, USPs, and target audience.
  • Competitor Audit Feed: Headers for Keyword, URL, Rank, Winning Factor, Content Gap, and Action Plan.

Clone the spreadsheet here.

2. Global Configuration

In the Config (Set) node, define your serp_results_amount (e.g., 10). This controls how many competitors are analyzed per keyword.

➕ How to Adapt the Template

  • Competitor Exclusion: Add a Filter node after "Market Discovery" to automatically skip domains like amazon.com or reddit.com if they aren't relevant to your niche.
  • Slack Alerts: Connect a Slack node after the AI analysis to notify your content manager immediately when a high-impact "Action Plan" is generated for a priority keyword.
  • Multi-Model Verification: Swap Gemini with Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o in the Strategic Audit section to compare different AI perspectives on the same competitor content.