SEO Automation: Why it’s high time you opt for it?

• Advance SEO

Before beginning with this article, we would like to give you a heads up that – SEO is a labour-intensive process that is now about fulfilling user intent. The post-Google RankBrain world has been catering to give the best possible result to users for the queries they’re searching for. Hence, valuable, fresh and interactive content along with authoritative link building has been the key that requires the human touch. Not only do you need to carefully plan and execute your strategies, but also you need to be on the constant lookout for changes in algorithms and other tweaks. 

But the fact that SEO requires full dedication doesn’t mean that you can’t use tools and software to simplify the procedure, especially in the case of large websites.

According to a Salesforce survey conducted in 2017, 67% of marketers use marketing automation for their decision-making and it was predicted that in the next two years, an additional 21% would join in.

Another research shows that AI(artificial intelligence) is the major component of automation, which is expected to add $15.3 trillion annually to the global GDP by 2030.

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What is SEO Automation?

SEO automation is one of the most powerful forces that is shaping the search engine marketing industry with a number of tools and software compiling a broad range of insights into one dashboard that is very easy to digest and valuable for your decision making.

Its crucial to understand what tasks you can actually automate and what you can’t. The activities conducted in SEO fall broadly into 2 areas – the creative work and the research. Creative work includes content creation, strategy, relationship-building, and other things that require manual effort. Its technically not possible to automate the creativity in SEO especially in the post Panda and Penguin SEO world where there are no shortcuts to successful link earning and content creation. Also, you can’t review the manual review, webmaster outreach & link reclamation efforts on your backlink analysis and auditing. Whereas, in the research bucket there are many tasks that can qualify for automation such as keyword research, competitor research, which keywords you should focus on, internal linking, cleaning up of broken links, etc. 

Sure, SEO requires a high level of dedication and effort from your team, but we say that you could channel that effort into areas that cannot be automated. Unfortunately, most people tend to think of automation as an insignificant thing or spam – which is actually a misconception.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits of SEO automation.

Powerful Data

In today’s world, data from the right sources is extremely valuable! While it isn’t the sole factor responsible for your team’s success, it is the driving force behind great decision making. Data-driven insights can enlighten you with the areas you need to channel your energy into for achieving the best results.

SaaS tools and software can reveal accurate data that can take days or even weeks to produce manually. To begin with, a project you need to forecast your industry’s traffic potential which you can with a number of state-of-the-art software like SEMrush, SimilarWeb, etc. We’ll have a detailed discussion about the activities that can be automated and the best tools one can use for automation in a later part of the article.

Reduces Team Burnout

Team burnouts are a major area of concern in today’s fast-paced jobs. A post by American Management Association says that ongoing repetitive tasks can cause demotivation in employees.

Many tasks in SEO are monotonous and do not require menial strenuous efforts like rank tracking, competitive analysis, etc. If you’re still investing manual efforts for tasks as such then you are prone to view a visible reduction in your employee’s performance.

You invest in your employees when you invest in SEO automation. Your employees could do better at achieving more by focusing on problem solving and creativity because these are the guys who would take your business ahead! Automation provides a foundation for innovative thinking.

Helps Teams to Scale their Business

SEO is challenging and certainly wouldn’t take off the first time. But if you have the right systems in place, you can leverage on pacing up things. Scaling your business is a hot topic and SEO automation introduces new and fine practices as they emerge.

Just as an extension to the second point, investing your resources in creative work and not repetitive tasks can help you boost your potential as a brand. Instead of having many employees carry out different tasks and risking a higher opportunity for mistakes, automation can be a better alternative.

What Activities of SEO can you Automate?

Here are some tasks in SEO that you can efficiently automate via tools.

• Technical Audits
• Keyword Research
• Content optimization
• Content distribution
• Tag management
• Internal linking

Best Tools in the Industry for SEO Automation

You will likely find that a mixture of both automated and manual SEO will work for you and will be dependent on the tasks at hand. A successful SEO campaign should be built out over time where far-sighted decisions will pay dividends in the long run.

A successful SEO campaign can be built out over time with a combination of automated and manual SEO depending on the tasks at hand. However, processes like content creation and organic link building are not supposed to be automated because not only would you end up with low-quality content but also have high chances of getting penalized.

SEMrush for Keyword Research

The below chart shows the average amount of time spent on the essential but repetitive task of keyword research based on the size of the site.

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Keyword research is the base of any good SEO. For starters, the Google Keyword Planner is a great tool that is free to have a closer look at the keywords from a paid search point of view, but SEMrush can save you a lot of time and effort. It is the most popular tool used by search engine marketers that automates keyword rankings, backlink profiles with a powerful dashboard.

The Keyword research tool offers various elements to identify your competitor’s best keywords, to observe position changes in domains, finding long-tail keywords for organic search and paid search as well. 

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The Keyword Magic tool is a deep-dive into your organic search competitors with information like their traffic sources and keywords, their recent ups and downs, with filters to segregate data and SERP features, etc. You can also find new keyword opportunities for long-tail keywords and easily sort things in the Keyword Analyzer. We have a dedicated post for how to perform keyword research in less than an hour with the help of the tool.

Note: We have a trial subscription of the SEMrush for you to get a hands on!

Not only keyword research, but the tool is the most recommended for custom report building. It offers integrations with Google Analytics and Google Data Studio as well. All you have to do is select widgets relevant to your report and customize it to your preference. The report builder updates info in real-time whenever you need to generate a report. You can also schedule them and use them as templates.

Ahrefs for Backlink Analysis

Link building is as important as keyword research for your SEO efforts to bear fruit. Obtaining credible backlinks from reputable websites is half the job done when building authority for your website. Ahrefs is the industry’s most recommended tool for backlink analysis (We have also compared between Ahrefs and SEMrush in general). The tool crawls 6 billion web pages and has an index of 3 trillion known URLs which makes it an amazingly good option for backlink analysis.

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The Rank Tracker tool helps you set the monitoring for your ranking on organic search. You can also get alerts for new keyword opportunities, new/lost backlinks and brand mentions. With respect to competitor tracking, you can find content attracting most backlinks in your industry so that you know where to get backlinks from.

Screaming Frog for Site Audits and Crawling

Technical SEO is very crucial for boosting the performance of your website in organic search. Excellent SEO audits are key to fix your site from the core and for that, the Screaming Frog SEO spider tool is the industry’s best choice.

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It is a web crawling tool that checks for broken links, redirects, analyzes page titles, metadata, and also discovers duplicate content. It can also generate XML sitemaps and of course, it integrates with Google Analytics. What’s more, you can even set up scheduled crawls and clean broken links on your website.

Final Thoughts

Fortunately, SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be efficiently automated with numerous software and tools. And when utilized properly, it really can make a big difference for a business that succeeds and a business that fails.

An Alternative to Automating SEO!

There are many cons to automating SEO which include generation of low-quality backlinks when not used properly, which could get you penalized. There’s a great solution to that –  Availing SEO services from SEO wizards!

You can always reach out to experts that have been working in the industry for more than 9 years with the wisdom of what it takes to drive better results. You can cut down the time spent figuring out how to use the tools as we would do it all for you!

Contact Us to Know More!