Ask any SEO professional what they want for Christmas, and it won’t be a surprise to hear SEO automation.
Yes, SEO is a wonderful thing. When done right, it yields the most spectacular results for your business. But notice the emphasis on ‘done right’. We are talking about the sheer amount of time and effort behind getting SEO results. How many hours have you spent on links monitoring or backlink analysis for your strategy? While such tasks are vital, admit it – you wish there were something that could automate them.
Voila! SEO automation enters the picture. Although you still can’t quite automate the entire SEO process end-to-end, you can certainly let the AI and SEO automation tools take over, at least partially. The result? You don’t have to worry about long, boring, repetitive manual tasks. Additionally, you will get a lot more time to fine-tune the more critical aspects of your SEO.
Fascinating, right? Dive right in if you want answers to questions like:
- What is SEO automation?
- How do you automate your SEO exactly?
- What all SEO tasks can you automate?
- What are the 4 best automated SEO software and tools for you?
- Is there any alternative to SEO automation?
What is SEO Automation?
SEO automation is a process that uses a combination of tools and software to systemise certain critical SEO tasks. This reduces the amount of manual work required for SEO campaigns and also allows you to improve its speed and efficiency. SEO automation is an exciting development in the world of digital marketing, thanks to its host of benefits.
This development comes as a welcome respite for not just SEO professionals but also digital marketers, agencies and businesses. This is because of how much time, effort and money it saves. The biggest advantage of automation in SEO is the reduction of manual work and speeding up dull and lengthy processes.
Advantages of SEO Automation
SEO automation tools enable you to simplify your campaigns and improve efficiency and productivity. Those at the pinnacle of the SEO industry already regard automation in SEO as less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Naturally, when you are freed from doing tiring manual tasks, you can concentrate on adding work value. These tasks could be anything, such as technical site audits or reporting.
That doesn’t mean that you can automate everything. The scope of SEO automation is still evolving, and we haven’t reached that stage yet. But there’s a great case to be made for why you should give SEO automation a shot:
- Reduces manual work in SEO
- Saves you time and effort when it comes to repetitive, dull and laborious tasks
- Promotes better resource utilisation so that you can focus on more urgent and essential SEO tasks
- Compensates for lack of adequate technical knowledge as automated SEO software can help you with accomplishing complex tasks with ease
- Saves operational and hiring costs because there are many paid and free SEO automation tools available that you can readily access and integrate into your work pipeline
- Betters speed, scale and efficiency of SEO processes which in turn leads to the delivery of faster insights and quicker results
- Eliminates the risk of manual errors and increases the accuracy and thoroughness of data and SEO processes
- Allows you to meet stricter deadlines and complete more projects on time
All this sounds great, but now you must be wondering how SEO automation works. Let’s take a look.
Also Read: White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO vs Gray Hat SEO
How Does SEO Automation Work?
The idea behind SEO automation is straightforward. You need to first arrange the best automated SEO tools as per your requirement. These consist of desktop software and utilities that essentially assist webmasters in the systematisation of repetitive SEO tasks. The requirement is often laid down by the webmasters depending upon what processes they need to streamline to achieve the best results.
As a process, SEO automation can work on any of the following:
Data collection: Data collection and aggregation is the first and most basic level of automation in SEO. It enables you to automate SEO reporting, dashboards rank tracking, backlinks, site crawl data, etc. This is the bedrock of the rest of your SEO automation strategy. You don’t even need sophisticated or expensive SEO and marketing automation software to pull this off. Before you jump into it, always thoroughly consider the SLAs, security, scale, and stability of any such tool.
Fish for insights: SEO automation begins working on churning out actionable, site-specific insights once it has progressed well with data collection. These insights consist of alerts and recommendations. Alerts utilise AI and machine learning algorithms to keep an eye out for any deviations from normal in your SEO. For example, an alert can notify you if there’s a sudden change in the rankings.
Recommendations provide you custom insights in the form of various analysis: content, log-file, backlink, keyword research, technical audits, etc. Your experts can then choose to follow through with certain recommendations and tailor their strategy.
Scaling execution: If the SEO automation tools at your disposal are sophisticated enough, they can also assist you with execution. These often consist of deploying real-time changes to a site without any need for human intervention. Truth be told, this last stage of SEO automation is still years away from becoming a common weapon in every marketer’s arsenal.
At the end of the day, how automation in SEO works is down to how you approach it. Here, you can always favour the three-step methodology:
- discovering the right data,
- selecting the right strategy,
- implementing A/B testing.
This way, you can refine your strategy before taking it live on the site for good. Remember, despite the level of automation, a good SEO expert always keeps track of everything. The automation will do the work for you in terms of data and recommendations. How you piece it all together will always be the final piece of the puzzle!
Which SEO Tasks Can Be Automated?
This is perhaps the most important question SEO marketers are asking today: ‘What all can I automate for my SEO strategy?’ Well, you would be happy to know that different kinds of automated SEO software can take care of different processes. All you need to do is some minor initial configuration after learning how to use them.
Here is a good selection of repetitive tasks that you must automate to make your SEO campaign more efficient:
- Keyword Position tracking: Checking the position of a website on Google for a given competing keyword requires continuous monitoring. A keyword position tracker tool simplifies this process, especially when you have hundreds of site pages.
- Technical Site Audit: Tracking the performance of a site, especially after launching an SEO campaign, can be very tedious. An automated SEO audit for a site allows you to track elements like broken links, uptime, page load time, etc. – all in one place and in real-time.
- Brand Mentions and Links Monitoring: Keeping a tab on what online conversations are happening around your business in real-time is essential. But it can be extremely time-consuming as well. The good news is that many monitoring tools use automation to continuously measure your brand perception and relevant links.
- Quality Backlink Analysis: Monitoring every site page and associated quality backlinks is another process that eats up precious time. With automated SEO optimization, you can speed it up. This lets you build your site’s authority and trust with greater efficiency.
- Reporting: SEO automation tools help you with timely recommendations in the form of automated SEO reports. These often contain actionable insights on technical audits, content analysis, competitor analysis, keyword analysis, etc.
- Analysis of log files: Automating log-file analysis will allow you to swiftly determine greater opportunities for your SEO by measuring the crawling behaviour of search engines.
- Keyword intent analysis: Understanding changing keyword metrics will help you keep pace with the kind of content Google prefers for related keywords. Automation tools can add a lot of detailed insight to this analysis in real-time.
- Generating meta descriptions at scale: Optimising large websites that require an insane number of meta descriptions can be quite a challenge. Thankfully, we have automation tools that can take this headache away!
As you can see, the possibilities in SEO automation are endless. The key here is to figure out the best automated SEO software and the best automated SEO tools for the same. In the next section, let’s take a look at four amazing SEO tools for automation that we think you will love.
Also Read: What’s the Difference Between SEO and SEM?
What are the 4 Best Automation tools to Manage Your SEO Campaigns?
Now that you understand the basics of how to automate SEO, you need to grab hold of the best tools and software for the same. The good news is that the internet is filled with great options for every specific task that you need to automate for your SEO campaign.
In the following list, we have noted down the ones that we can’t recommend enough. These SEO automation tools offer a good mix of functionalities to cover all your bases. So, what are they? Here we go:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Screaming Frog
- SE Ranking
Let’s take a detailed look at each one of them.