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

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. 🎁 Get a free Web Scraping API subscription here 👉🏻 --- 🛠️ 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 serpresultsamount (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.