Content & Social Media · n8n

SEO Brief Generator: drop a keyword in a sheet, get a full content brief back in 3 minutes

An n8n workflow that watches a Google Sheet for new target keywords, scrapes the current top-10 results with SerpApi, has Claude reverse-engineer what's ranking (angles, structure, gaps), and writes a complete content brief — outline, questions to answer, and the angle nobody's covering — back into the sheet.

difficulty Intermediatesetup 40 minresult Writer-ready briefs on demand — the $80 deliverable agencies sell, self-served
  1. 1

    Watch the keyword queue

    A Google Sheets Trigger fires on new rows in your keywords tab (columns: keyword, status, brief). Anyone on the team adds keywords; the workflow picks up rows where status is empty.

  2. 2

    Pull the live SERP

    An HTTP Request to SerpApi with the keyword returns the top 10 organic results, People-Also-Ask questions, and related searches as clean JSON. A second HTTP Request + HTML extract pair fetches the readable text of the top 3 URLs.

  3. 3

    Claude builds the brief

    One structured call: SERP data + top-3 texts in, the seven-section brief out in markdown. The differentiation-angle instruction is the valuable part: 'identify what searchers need that none of the top 10 delivers — that gap is the recommended angle.'

  4. 4

    Write back and notify

    A Google Sheets update puts the brief in the row and flips status to ready; a Telegram ping tells the writer. Cost per brief: one SerpApi credit + a few cents of Claude — against the $50–100 agencies charge for the same document.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is in the generated brief?

Seven sections: search intent read (informational/commercial/comparison), the common structure of ranking pages, an H2/H3 outline that covers the table stakes, People-Also-Ask questions to answer, entities/terms the top pages share, a differentiation angle (what the top 10 all miss), and suggested title + meta. It's the checklist a good SEO writer builds manually in an hour.

Does it read the full text of ranking pages?

It reads SerpApi's structured results (titles, snippets, PAA, related searches) plus the fetched text of the top 3 pages. That's deliberately shallow-but-wide: enough signal to map the landscape without scraping ten full sites per keyword. The top-3 deep read is where the structural insights come from.

Is this just 'AI content' that Google will ignore?

No — this generates the brief, not the article. The output is research and structure for a human writer (or a careful AI-assisted draft you edit). The difference matters: content that ranks durably has real expertise layered on solid structure. This automates the structure half.

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