How We Replaced a $2,000/Month SEO Agency With OpenClaw

$24,000 per year. Gone.

That is what we were paying an SEO agency for keyword research, content briefs, backlink analysis, and monthly reports that arrived on their schedule, not ours.

So we built our own system. Four scripts, a handful of APIs, and about 20 hours of setup time. Now we get 5x the output automatically, every week, for roughly $75 per month in API costs.

Here is exactly how we did it.

The Problem With SEO Agencies

I am not here to trash agencies. But the model has structural problems that make it a bad fit for teams that move fast.

Latency is baked in. Ask on Monday, get deliverables on Friday. Sometimes next Friday.

Reports are manual, so they are infrequent. Monthly snapshots when SEO moves every day.

The tool stack is hidden. They use Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console. The same tools you could access yourself.

Scope creep pricing. Want to add a competitor to the tracking list? That is a change order.

After eight months of this, I started wondering: what if I just built it myself?

Component 1: Automated Keyword Research

The first thing any SEO agency does is keyword research. It is also the easiest to automate.

We started with a simple script that takes 15 seed keywords, expands them to 200-300 variations with volume and difficulty data, and runs every Monday morning.

The time savings are real. Our agency spent 4 hours per month on keyword research and billed us accordingly. The script does more work in 2 minutes.

Component 2: Competitor Backlink Intelligence

Every week, we scan five competitors for their newest backlinks and identify outreach opportunities.

The logic is simple. When a competitor gets featured on a high-authority site, we know within 7 days. Then we pitch the same publication with our angle.

We filter out social media and review sites automatically. We only surface content pages like roundups, guides, and “best of” lists where inclusion is editorial.

A typical weekly scan surfaces 15-20 actionable opportunities, sorted by domain authority. Our agency was doing this manually once a month and finding fewer targets.

Component 3: Google Search Console Monitoring

Every Monday at 9 AM, an automated report pulls the last 28 days of Search Console data and compares it to the previous period.

The report categorizes everything into four buckets:

Winners. Keywords where position improved 3 or more spots. These are working. Double down.

Losers. Keywords where position dropped 3 or more spots. Something changed. Investigate.

Quick wins. Keywords ranking 8 through 15. These are close to page one and worth optimizing.

CTR opportunities. High impressions with low click-through rate. These need better title tags.

Our agency delivered this analysis monthly. By the time we saw a ranking drop, it was a month old. Now we catch problems within a week.

Component 4: Content Brief Generator

This is where automation and human judgment blend together. We pull the top 10 Google results for a target keyword, analyze what the competition covers, and generate a structured content brief.

The brief includes recommended titles, target word count based on top-ranking content, a full outline with H2s and H3s, and most importantly, the gaps. What are the top three results missing that we can include?

Our agency charged for content briefs separately. They took 3-5 business days. Our system generates them in about 2 minutes.

The Stack

Here is what the full setup costs:

Compare that to $2,000 per month for the agency.

The Schedule

Everything runs automatically:

Monday 9 AM    — Keyword research expansion
Monday 9 AM    — GSC weekly report
Wednesday 9 AM — Competitor backlink scan
Wed + Fri 10 AM — Backlink outreach emails

Total human involvement per week: about 30 minutes reviewing outputs and making decisions.

Side-By-Side Results

Annual savings: $23,100.

But the math does not capture the real advantages:

• Speed. Minutes, not days.
• Frequency. Weekly, not monthly.
• Control. Want to add a competitor? One line change. No change order.

When Not to Do This

This approach is not for everyone.

Skip it if you hate technical work. If your time is worth more than the agency fee, keep paying. If you need strategic guidance and not just data, an agency adds value that scripts cannot.

Do this if you are technical or have technical resources. If you are frustrated by agency latency. If you want more frequent data. If you like building systems that compound over time.

The Part Nobody Talks About

The “secret” is not the scripts. Everything described here is straightforward to build.

The actual hard parts are:

1. Systems thinking. Connecting keyword research to content briefs to backlink outreach into a single workflow.
2. Maintenance. APIs change. Data formats shift. Someone needs to keep things running.
3. Knowing what to do with the output. A list of keywords is worthless without a content strategy behind it.

Most people will bookmark an article like this. Few will actually implement it. The ones who do will save $23K per year and get better data in the process.