How to Use Your Competitors’ Blogs to Drive Organic Traffic to Your Website

The Answer Is Already Sitting in Front of You

Most businesses spend hours trying to figure out what to write about. Brainstorming sessions, internal discussions, content calendars built on gut instinct. The result is usually a list of topics that feel right but have no data behind them.

Here is the thing nobody points out early enough: if you have competitors who are actively blogging and getting organic traffic, they have already solved this problem for you. Every blog post they rank for is proof that someone in your shared audience searched for that topic and Google decided it was worth showing. That is not a guess. That is confirmed demand.

You do not have to start from scratch. You just have to know how to read the data that is already out there.

Why This Approach Works

When a competitor blog post ranks in Google’s top ten results for a keyword, it means Google has evaluated the content, compared it against everything else available, and decided it is relevant and trustworthy enough to show to real searchers. The demand for that topic is proven. The keyword is real. People are clicking.

If you create content on the same topic that is more thorough, more current, better structured, or simply more useful to the reader, you are competing directly for that same position. You are not experimenting with topics that might work. You are targeting searches that are already working for someone in your space.

That is a fundamentally different starting point than writing about whatever seems interesting this month.

What You Need Before You Start

This process uses Semrush. Specifically the Domain Overview feature and the Top Pages report. These two features together give you a complete picture of what any competitor’s blog is ranking for and how much traffic each post is bringing in.

You will also need a list of two to three competitors whose blogs you want to analyse. They do not need to be your direct business competitors. They just need to be websites in your niche that are actively publishing blog content and getting search traffic from it.

The Full Process, Step by Step

What to Realistically Expect

Organic rankings do not appear overnight. New content typically takes three to six months to develop meaningful rankings, sometimes longer in more competitive industries. That timeline is normal and not a sign that the approach is not working.

Not every post will land on page one. But even page two and page three rankings contribute to something important: topical authority. The more blog posts you publish within a specific subject area, the more Google recognises your site as a relevant and trustworthy source on that topic. Rankings that start on page three in month four often move to page one by month ten as that authority builds.

The audience this strategy brings in is worth thinking about too. These are people who found you through Google because they were actively looking for information. They are in research mode. That is the audience most likely to become leads over time because they arrived with intent, not by accident.

When This Strategy Has Limits

This approach works best when competitors already have blogs that are generating measurable traffic. If you are in an industry where nobody is blogging with any real results, the data is thin and the strategy loses its foundation.

It also has limits if you want to build a genuinely distinct voice rather than a content strategy shaped by what others are already doing. Following competitor keywords means following competitor topics. That produces traffic but it does not automatically build authority as the definitive source in your niche.

For those situations, a buyer persona-driven approach produces stronger results. Instead of starting with what competitors rank for, you start with a deep understanding of your ideal customer and build content around their specific questions, frustrations, and decisions. I cover the full process for that in the next post: how to build a blog calendar using the buyer persona approach.

The Simplest Way to Think About This

Your competitors are not your enemies in content strategy. They are your research department. Every post they have ranking in Google is a data point that tells you what your shared audience cares about enough to search for.

Use that data. Build better content. Show up where the searches are already happening.

If you want help building this kind of content strategy for your business, or if you want to talk through what the right approach looks like for your specific industry, book a call.

See how I approach SEO strategy →

Book a free 30-minute call →

Dhruv is an SEO consultant working with business owners, founders, and agencies. If organic search is not delivering for your business, this is where to start.

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Why I Built This

Running a niche SEO blog while managing client work is a time problem. You know you need to publish consistently. You know Google rewards sites that stay fresh and build topical depth. But actually writing two quality articles a day on top of everything else is not realistic for most people running a real business.

I looked at the standard options. Freelance writers cost $50 to $150 per article and still need briefing, editing, and back-and-forth. Generic AI writing tools produce content that reads like a Wikipedia article written by someone who has never done SEO. Content agencies are slow, expensive, and almost always off-brand.

None of those options solved the actual problem. I needed something that researched topics properly, wrote in a real voice, structured content for both readers and search engines, and ran every morning without me involved. So I built it for AI SEO Gazette from scratch.

What the System Actually Does

Every morning at 9 AM, a Python script wakes up on GitHub Actions and runs through the same sequence for two articles: one covering a current AI or SEO news story from the past 48 hours, and one covering an evergreen topic that practitioners are actively searching for right now.

For each article, it finds a topic worth writing about, pulls deep research from the web with real citations, hands that research to GPT-4o to write a structured 850 plus word article in HTML, fetches a featured image, uploads everything to WordPress with the right categories and tags, and immediately submits the new URL to Google Search Console for indexing.

Total runtime each morning: 8 to 12 minutes. Human involvement required: zero.

The Stack, Explained Simply

Here is every tool in the system and what it actually does:

# THE FULL STACK

Scheduler      GitHub Actions (cron)     — runs at 9 AM IST daily, free tier
Topic finder   Perplexity Sonar API      — live web access, real current topics
Researcher     Perplexity Sonar API      — deep research with citation URLs
Writer         OpenAI GPT-4o            — structured HTML article output
Publisher      WordPress REST API + JWT  — posts directly to WordPress
Images         Unsplash API             — free high quality featured photos
Indexing       GSC Indexing API         — tells Google to crawl immediately
Language       Python 3                 — glues everything together

The most important thing to understand about this stack is that none of these tools are expensive or obscure. GitHub Actions is free. Unsplash is free. The Google Search Console Indexing API is free. The only real costs are the Perplexity and OpenAI API calls, and those add up to roughly $0.15 to $0.35 per day.

How the Pipeline Flows

The script runs as a single Python file. Here is the full flow from trigger to published article:

GitHub Actions cron trigger (3:30 AM UTC = 9 AM IST)
         |
         v
WordPress JWT authentication
         |
         v
Bulk pre-load ALL categories + tags into memory
         (one single GET request — more on why this matters later)
         |
         v
FOR EACH article type [news, evergreen]:
         |
         +-- Perplexity Call 1: Topic selection
         |       returns: title, angle, source URL
         |
         +-- Perplexity Call 2: Deep research on that topic
         |       returns: 4000-8000 chars of research + citations
         |
         +-- Filter citations to authority domains only
         |
         +-- GPT-4o: Write full article as JSON
         |       input:  system prompt + research + citations
         |       output: title, HTML content, meta, categories, tags
         |
         +-- Validate: word count ≥700, FAQ block present,
         |          ≥3 categories, ≥4 tags
         |          (auto-retry once if failed)
         |
         +-- Unsplash: Fetch featured image
         |
         +-- WordPress: Upload image, resolve term IDs, publish post
         |
         +-- Google Search Console: Submit URL for immediate indexing

The Three Bugs That Nearly Broke Everything

The pipeline above looks clean now. It was not clean getting here. The system ran for several days publishing broken articles before I tracked down what was actually going wrong. Here are the three bugs in order of how much they cost me in time and frustration.

Bug One: WordPress Was Silently Ignoring Categories and Tags

Every article was publishing with exactly one category and zero tags. The script was not crashing. No errors were being thrown. It just quietly skipped every term after the first couple and moved on.

The cause was WordPress rate limiting. The original code called the REST API once per category and once per tag, sequentially. That is roughly 13 API calls in a row. WordPress started returning HTTP 429 errors after the first two or three calls, and the code was silently swallowing those errors and skipping the terms.

[WARNING] Skipping term 'AI in SEO': HTTP 400
[WARNING] Skipping term 'SEO Strategies': HTTP 429
[WARNING] Skipping term 'Content Optimization': HTTP 429
[WARNING] Skipping term 'SEO News': HTTP 429
[INFO] Categories: 1 assigned | Tags: 0 assigned

The fix was to stop making individual API calls entirely. Instead of asking WordPress for each term one by one, the script now makes a single GET request at startup that loads every existing category and tag into memory as a dictionary. From that point, term resolution is an instant lookup with no API calls at all.

def preload_wp_terms():
    for taxonomy, cache in [("categories", WP_CATEGORY_CACHE), ("tags", WP_TAG_CACHE)]:
        page = 1
        while True:
            r = requests.get(
                WP_URL + "/wp-json/wp/v2/" + taxonomy,
                params={"per_page": 100, "page": page}, ...
            )
            items = r.json()
            for item in items:
                cache[item["name"].lower()] = item["id"]  # instant lookup later
            if len(items) < 100:
                break  # no more pages
            page += 1

Bug Two: GPT-4o Was Including Its Own Instructions Inside the Article

This one was embarrassing to find live on the site. Published articles had visible headings like “HOOK”, “FAQ Block”, and “External Links” appearing as actual text that readers could see. The model was treating the numbered section labels in the prompt as headings to include in the HTML output.

The original prompt framed the article structure like this:

1. HOOK: One or two punchy opening sentences...
2. KEY TAKEAWAYS: Use this exact HTML block...
4. EXTERNAL LINKS: Naturally embed 2-3 links...
5. FAQ BLOCK: Exactly 4 Q&A pairs...

// GPT-4o read these as section titles and output them as <h2> tags
// Result: readers saw "HOOK" and "FAQ Block" as visible article headings

The fix was to rewrite the prompt structure entirely, replacing numbered labels with “Part 1, Part 2” framing and adding an explicit hard rule at the top of the prompt:

CRITICAL: Do NOT output any meta-labels or section titles like 'HOOK',
'BODY', 'FAQ Block', 'External Links', 'CTA', or any numbered section
markers as visible text in the article. These are writing instructions
for you, not headings to include in the output.

Bug Three: Word Count Kept Falling Short Even After Retries

Articles were coming in at 526 to 637 words even though the prompt asked for 850 plus. The retry sometimes made it worse, not better. The model was finishing the article structure and stopping, treating “I have covered all the sections” as the signal to end rather than “I have hit the word count.”

The issue was that “write at least 850 words” was buried at the end of a long prompt and gave the model no actionable instruction for what to do when it was running short. The fix was to make the requirement impossible to miss and give the model a specific action to take if it was under target:

MANDATORY WORD COUNT: The 'content' field must contain AT LEAST 850 words
of readable text (excluding HTML tags). Count carefully.

If you finish the how-to section and the FAQ and you have fewer than
850 words, you have not written enough.

Add more H2 body sections before the FAQ until you reach 850 words.
Do not truncate early. The main body section alone must be at least
600 words by itself.

What a Clean Run Looks Like

After all three fixes landed, here is what the actual log output looked like on the first fully successful run:

[INFO] WP term cache: 34 categories, 39 tags loaded.

[INFO] Article: Google AI Max Now Available (649 words)
[WARNING] Quality check failed — retrying...
[INFO] Retry result: PASSED (828 words)
[INFO] Categories: 5 assigned | Tags: 5 assigned
[INFO] Published: aiseogazette.com/google-ai-max-for-search-campaigns/
[INFO] GSC submitted: aiseogazette.com/google-ai-max-for-search-campaigns/

[INFO] Article: Mastering Generative Engine Optimization (762 words)
[INFO] Categories: 5 assigned | Tags: 5 assigned
[INFO] Published: aiseogazette.com/mastering-generative-engine-optimization/
[INFO] GSC submitted: aiseogazette.com/mastering-generative-engine-optimization/

[INFO] All 2 articles published successfully. Total runtime: 9 min 42 sec

What It Actually Costs

To put that in perspective: two researched, structured, published, and indexed articles every single day for the cost of a coffee per month. The manual equivalent of this output would cost $2,600 to $7,800 a year in writer fees alone.

What the System Cannot Do Yet

I want to be honest about the current limits because this is a real working system, not a concept piece.

It does not yet handle internal linking, meaning it will not automatically link new articles to older relevant posts on the site. It does not post to social media after publishing. It does not check whether a very similar topic was covered recently. And it does not yet read Search Console performance data to inform future topic selection, though that is the most interesting thing on the roadmap.

These are solvable problems. They just have not been built yet.

Five Things This Build Taught Me

Rate limits fail silently and that is the worst kind of failure. The WordPress 429 issue ran for days before I caught it because the script never crashed. Always log every skipped item with the actual reason it was skipped.

Tell the model what NOT to do, not just what to do. The section label bug was only fixed when I added an explicit negative instruction. Describing the structure you want is not enough on its own. You also have to describe what you do not want in the output.

Give the model an action, not just a target. “Write 850 words” is easy to ignore. “If you are under 850 words, add more H2 sections before the FAQ” gives it something concrete to do. Targets without actions get approximated. Actions get followed.

Bulk operations eliminate entire categories of bugs. Switching from 13 sequential API calls to one bulk GET did not just make the code faster. It made a whole class of rate-limiting failure impossible. Whenever you see sequential API calls in a loop, ask whether they can be batched.

Read the actual logs. Several times during this build I thought I understood the failure and I was wrong. The logs told the real story every time. Assumptions are expensive. Logs are free.

Want This for Your Own Site?

Beyond automation, if your business needs to show up in Google search results and in AI-generated answers (AEO), that is exactly what I work on with agencies, founders, and business owners every day. SEO and AEO are not separate strategies anymore. The sites that win over the next two years will be the ones that are structured for both.

If you want to talk about your content operations, your search visibility, or building a system like this for your own site, book a call. No sales pitch. Just a real conversation about what would actually move the needle for your business.

Read more on the blog →

Book a free 30-minute call →

Dhruv is an SEO and AEO consultant working with business owners, founders, and agencies. 500+ projects. 6+ years. If organic search is a problem for your business, this is the right place to start.

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Published by Dhruv — SEO Consultant for Agencies & Businesses

TL;DR

Managing multiple client projects across Google Sheets was eating hours every week. So I built three Google Apps Script automations that handle sheet creation, team permissions, hyperlinks, and project syncing — all from a single button click. What used to take 23 minutes per project now takes under 60 seconds. This post walks you through what I built, why I built it, and the exact bug I had to fix along the way.

Running an SEO operation across multiple agencies means a lot of moving parts. Clients, trackers, handoffs, status updates — the backend work can quietly eat your week if you let it.

For a while, I let it.

Every time I onboarded a new client project, the routine looked something like this: open a blank sheet, copy the template, rename it, share it with the right people, paste the hyperlink in the right place, update the main tracker, and then do the same thing again in the agency sheet. Rinse and repeat.

On a good week, that meant doing this three or four times. On a busy week, more. Each round took roughly 20 to 25 minutes. None of that time was billable. None of it was strategic. It was just friction — repetitive, error-prone, and completely unnecessary.

So I fixed it.

The Setup: What the Project System Looked Like

Before getting into the automations, here is some context on the structure I was working with.

I manage projects across multiple sheets — a Main Project Sheet that acts as a central hub, individual agency sheets for each team lead, and per-project Master Tracker sheets that hold detailed tracking data. Each sheet has two tabs: Running (active projects) and Suspended (paused or completed).

Every row in every sheet follows the same four-column structure:

• Column A: Website URL
• Column B: Start Date
• Column C: Client Name
• Column D: Master Tracker (a hyperlink to the project-specific sheet)

The goal was simple: when a new project gets added to the Running tab of an agency sheet, one button click should handle everything else automatically.

The Problem That Made Me Build This

The manual workflow had a few specific failure points that kept coming up.

Inconsistent hyperlinks. When you’re copying and pasting URLs manually, mistakes happen. A wrong link here, a missed update there, and suddenly someone on the team is looking at the wrong project sheet.

Permissions chaos. Different projects needed to be shared with different people. Ryan’s projects go to Ryan, Sam, and me. Alex’s projects go to Alex and me. Self projects stay with me. Managing that manually left room for access gaps that only surfaced at the worst times.

Sync failures. The Main Project Sheet and the agency sheets need to stay in sync. When you’re updating both manually, they drift apart. That creates confusion about what is active, what is suspended, and where the latest data lives.

Time. The biggest problem was simply time. Twenty-three minutes per project adds up fast. Across a year, that is easily 20 hours or more of setup work that produces zero client value.

What I Built: Three Automations, One Logic

I wrote three Google Apps Script automations — one for Alex’s projects, one for Ryan’s projects (NovaCare Digital), and one for my personal projects. They all follow the same core logic, with variations based on who gets access.

Automation 1: Alex’s Projects

This handles all client projects assigned to Alex. When triggered, it scans the Running tab for any row that has a website URL, start date, and client name but is missing a Master Tracker link. For each of those rows, it:

• Copies the template sheet and renames it using the client’s domain name
• Shares the new sheet with Alex and me
• Writes a working hyperlink formula into column D on that row
• Syncs the project data to the Main Project Sheet
• Handles suspended projects when needed

Trigger: clicking 🚀 Automation → Add Master Tracker Link from the custom menu.

Automation 2: Ryan’s Projects

Same structure, slightly different team. Ryan’s projects (under NovaCare Digital) involve three people — Sam, Ryan, and me — so the sharing step covers all three. The suspended project workflow also moves rows from the Running tab to the Suspended tab, then cleans up the corresponding entry on the Main Sheet.

This one was the most complex to build because keeping three sheets in sync (Ryan’s agency sheet, the Main Sheet, and the project-specific tracker) required careful sequencing to avoid overwriting data.

Automation 3: Self Projects

The simplest of the three. This one only processes rows where the client name includes “Self,” so personal and internal projects stay separated from client work. No team sharing. No agency sheet sync. Just a clean Master Tracker sheet created for my own reference.

Trigger: 🚀 Automation → Create Self Project Sheets

The Bug That Took Me a While to Figure Out

Here is the part I want to dwell on, because it is the kind of thing that can waste hours if you do not know what to look for.

When I first tested the automations, the hyperlinks were not working. The formula bar was showing HYPERLINK(...) instead of =HYPERLINK(...). The cells displayed as plain text. Clicking them did nothing.

At first I assumed it was a formula syntax issue. I checked the formula. It was fine. I ran the script again. Same result. The formula was being stored as text, not executed as a formula.

After some digging, I found the cause.

The original broken approach inserted a new row into the sheet first, then tried to immediately write a formula into that new row:

// ❌ Broken
sheet.insertRows(2, 1);
sheet.getRange(2, 4).setFormula(`=HYPERLINK("${newSheetUrl}","Master Tracker")`);

The problem is that Google Sheets’ API handles row insertions asynchronously. By the time setFormula() runs, the sheet structure has not fully settled. The formula gets interpreted as a text value instead of a formula, and the = sign effectively disappears.

The fix was straightforward once I understood the cause. Instead of inserting a row and writing to it, I wrote directly to the existing row where the data already lived. No insertion. No timing conflict. The formula executed correctly every time.

// ✅ Fixed
sheet.getRange(rowIndex, 4).setFormula(`=HYPERLINK("${newSheetUrl}","Master Tracker")`);

The lesson: if you are writing formulas in Apps Script, always set them on stable, pre-existing rows. Row insertion operations create a timing gap that can silently break formula execution.

The Result: Before vs. After

Here is what the workflow looked like before and after:

Before (manual):

• Create and name the sheet: ~5 minutes
• Copy the template over: ~2 minutes
• Configure sharing for the right people: ~3 minutes
• Add hyperlinks to two sheets: ~5 minutes
• Enter project data by hand: ~5 minutes
• Move tabs if the project changes status: ~3 minutes
• Total: ~23 minutes per project

After (automated):

• Add three data points to the sheet (URL, date, client name): 30 seconds
• Click the automation button: 10 seconds
• Wait for everything else to run: 20 seconds
• Total: ~60 seconds per project

That is roughly a 95% reduction in setup time. More importantly, it is error-free. The right people always get access. The hyperlinks always work. The Main Sheet always stays in sync.

What This Taught Me About Operations

I want to be direct about something: the automation itself is not the point.

The point is that repetitive backend tasks are a silent tax on every agency and freelance operation. They rarely feel urgent. They do not show up in client reports. But they accumulate. And over time, they add up to real hours that could have gone toward strategy, outreach, or simply not working on weekends.

If you are running client projects out of Google Sheets and doing any part of the setup manually, you are probably spending more time on it than you realise. A bit of Apps Script — which is just JavaScript, and which requires no external tools or subscriptions — can handle most of that automatically.

The barrier is usually not technical. It is just that nobody has sat down to build it yet.

Want to Talk Through Your Setup?

If you are managing client SEO projects and the operational side is starting to feel heavy, I am happy to talk through it. I work with agencies, founders, and business owners on both the SEO strategy side and the systems that support it.

Read more articles like this on the blog →

If you want to talk about your specific situation — whether that is project management, white-label SEO, or organic growth strategy — book a 30-minute call. No pitch, no packages. Just a conversation about what is actually worth doing.

Book a free 30-minute call →

Dhruv is an SEO consultant working with agencies, founders, and business owners. 500+ projects. 6+ years. No fluff.

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