The Scenario
The quarterly content sprint starts in eight days. You've got 50 target keywords locked in an Excel workbook — column A, one per row — and the content strategy doc says to base the editorial calendar on SERP competition analysis. Which means you need to know what's actually ranking for each keyword before anyone starts writing.
Last time you did this, you ran each keyword through Google manually, copied the top five titles and URLs into the workbook by hand, and by keyword 30 you were questioning your career decisions.
The bad version:
- Open a browser, type the first keyword, screenshot or manually copy the top five results into the workbook row.
- Repeat 50 times, navigating back to the workbook after each one, pasting carefully into the right row and columns.
- Discover partway through that three of your keywords return local packs or featured snippets that break the pattern, and figure out what to do with those rows on the fly.
The content brief is due to the team on Friday. Fifty keywords at three minutes each is two and a half hours of search-and-paste that could go toward the actual strategy work.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the keyword list in your worksheet and, through its Apify MCP integration, runs a Google SERP scrape for every keyword in one batch — no console visits, no row-by-row automation.
For every keyword in column A, run an Apify Google SERP scrape and fill columns B, C, and D with the top result's title, URL, and snippet. If a keyword returns a featured snippet or local pack instead of a standard result, log that in column E.
What You Get
- Column B: title of the top organic result for each keyword.
- Column C: URL of the top organic result.
- Column D: the snippet text Google shows beneath the result.
- Column E: a note for any keyword where the top position is a featured snippet, local pack, or People Also Ask box rather than a standard organic result.
- All 50 keywords processed in a single Apify batch run, not 50 sequential calls.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want the top five results per keyword, not just position one
For each keyword in column A, run an Apify SERP scrape and write the top 5 result titles into columns B–F and their corresponding URLs into columns G–K. If fewer than 5 results appear, leave the remaining cells blank.
Some keywords are brand names and return knowledge panels you want to exclude
Run an Apify SERP scrape for each keyword in column A. Skip any row where the keyword contains a proper noun (column B is flagged "brand"). For the remaining keywords, write the top 3 organic result URLs into columns C, D, and E.
You need search volume estimates alongside the SERP data
For each keyword in column A, use Apify to pull the top 3 SERP results (title and URL) into columns B–D. Also check if a 'Search Volume' column exists in my workbook — if it's empty for any row, note "volume missing" in column E.
Full competitive brief in one shot
For each keyword in column A: run an Apify Google SERP scrape, extract the top 5 organic result titles and URLs, write titles to columns B–F and URLs to columns G–K, check for featured snippets and log "featured" in column L if present, and flag any keyword where all top 5 results are from the same root domain in column M. Run all 50 keywords as a single batch.
Combining the SERP pull with the competitive flag logic in one prompt saves a second round of manual review.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a keyword list you've been sitting on, then ask it to run a Google SERP scrape with Apify and fill the results directly into your columns. You might also find the URL text extraction spoke useful, or browse the Apify MCP overview for the full list of workflows.