You don’t need more time.
You need fewer things that depend on you showing up.
If keyword research is something you repeat weekly, this guide will help you automate it, step by step.
You’ll use free tools. You won’t need coding experience. And by the end, you’ll have a living system that fetches, filters, and stores keyword ideas in Airtable, every single Monday at 9AM.
You already know keyword research is essential.
But the work behind it? Often shallow. Repetitive. Mechanical. Copying search ideas. Pasting them into spreadsheets. Reviewing them later.
That kind of task should not require your time or brain.
This system removes the grunt work, so you can focus on strategy, content creation, and clients. And once it’s running, it never stops. Even if you do.
| Tool | Why It’s The Right Choice |
|---|---|
| N8N | A powerful visual automation tool. Open source. Free to use. You can run it locally or in the cloud. Think of it as Zapier, but with more control and no limits on logic or complexity. |
| SerpApi | Gives you clean, structured data from Google Search, without the hassle of scraping or browser automation. It’s the easiest way to get real search suggestions programmatically. |
| Airtable | A flexible database with a spreadsheet-like interface. Perfect for storing and organizing keywords. Easy to connect. Works great with N8N. Free tier is more than enough for this use case. |
This is the part of the workflow where you feed in your initial ideas. Think of these as the “starting points” for keyword expansion.
Instead of storing them in a file or typing them out each time, you’ll create them inside N8N directly using a simple Set node.