The Good, Bad, and Useful Tips for SEO Automation
Business owners know that time equals money, and even the mention of that three-letter initialism — SEO — fills marketers with dread, as they start worrying about the time that they’ll have to spend implementing manual SEO strategies. Every marketer knows that the effort that they put into SEO is worth it in the long run, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the work that needs to be done.
The good news? Many SEO tasks can now be automated with the right tools and strategies, so you can save time and effort that could be used for something more productive than tedious tasks. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that there are still a few things that need to be done manually and can’t just be done once with a “set it and forget it” approach. Certain tools can take away some of the technical pain, but make no mistake: There’s no magical software that can get you higher search engine rankings.
The SEO process is complicated, which means not all of it can be automated, but some parts can be automated with SEO tools that will make your life easier and free up time for other creative and administrative work. The key is to understand what can be automated and what shouldn’t be automated.
The Pros and Cons of SEO Automation
As with any automation that you can implement for your business, there are pros and cons to automating SEO.
Here are a few of the pros:
- Frees Up Your Team and Reduces Burnout
Unless you have unlimited resources, it’s likely that your marketing team members wear many hats and are often stretched thin. When they have to deal with tasks that are detail-oriented and repetitive like SEO tactics, it can lead to burn out or impact their work in other areas. Investing in automating part of your SEO can free up your team to think of the bigger picture and take your marketing to the next level.
- Helps You Capture Data
SEO automation can reveal data that would be difficult to collect manually. This can give you insights into the reach and awareness that your brand is making within your industry.
- Lets Your Team Scale
If your business needs to scale quickly, like if you have local SEO needs and want to appear in “Near Me” searches, there are automations with one dashboard that enable you to update all the top directories with just a few clicks. Since it’s all centralized, it’s quicker to update and there’s less of a chance of making mistakes.
Of course, with any implementations, there can be negatives that don’t align with your business. Here are a few cons of SEO automation:
- Risk of Low-Quality Backlinks
Not all backlinks are created equal, and bad links can harm your site by getting your site downgraded by the search engine algorithms. Depending on what kind of backlink automation you implement, this could hurt your authority more than help it.
- Focus on Quantity Over Quality
Automating SEO can help you get more done, but more is not always better. Ensure that when implementing any kind of SEO automation, you’re making sure the quality is up to par, in addition to upping your SEO tactics.
- Not All SEO Can or Should Be Automated
When implementing automation into your SEO practices, it’s important to distinguish which tactics are best done automatically and which ones will need to be done manually. While SEO automation tools are certainly becoming more sophisticated, there are certain things that shouldn’t be left to chance and are better served when done by hand.
SEO You Should Automate
So, which SEO tactics should you automate for your business? Here is a list of suggested SEO tactics that can effectively be automated to help your team be more efficient.
Keyword Monitoring: Finding new keyword and topic opportunities is a crucial way to build your SEO and site authority, and this time-consuming task can easily be automated with available tools. Use tools that can automate keyword monitoring to track constantly fluctuating factors, like search volume, competition, and related keywords, in real time. Automation can also reveal insights into domain authority through backlink monitoring.
SEO Keyword Automation Tools You Can Use — While some of these tools do it all, the tools that specifically perform well in keyword monitoring include:
Backlink Monitoring: To improve your domain authority and increase your search engine rankings, it’s essential to build quality backlinks; having spammy or low-quality backlinks can hurt your site. That’s why it’s important to monitor them. Automated tools make it easy to scan lists of up-to-date backlinks so you can block any unsavory ones and build relationships with the credible ones to grow those opportunities.
SEO Backlink Automation Tools You Can Use — While some of these tools do it all, the tools that perform well in backlink monitoring include:
Competitor Analysis: Understanding what your competition is doing is imperative to your business, but it takes quite a bit of time to look into their daily activities if you’re doing it manually. That’s why it’s a good idea to use tools to save time and gather all the information you need on your competitors in one place. You can unearth some of the strategies that your rivals concentrate on, including their traffic sources, content topics, target audiences, and more.
SEO Competitor Automation Tools You Can Use — While some of these tools do it all, the tools that perform well in competitor analysis include:
Mentions Monitoring: Whether on social or the web, you should keep track of what people are saying about your brand. This way, you can take advantage of the positive and reel in the negative.
SEO Monitoring Automation Tools You Can Use — Keep track of your mentions around the web with tools like these:
Content Tools: Content is one of the most important parts of SEO, and while there is no magic tool that creates blogs and web content for your site, there are more than a few tools that can improve your content and make it SEO-friendly.
SEO Content Tools You Can Use — Tools to consider adding to your SEO content toolbox to improve or maintain the quality of your content and improve SEO rankings include:
- Keyword density checker, like this one from Small SEO Tools or SEMrush
- Duplicate content checker, like Siteliner or this one from SEO Review Tools
- Grammar check tools, like Grammarly or Hemingway App
SEO Audit and Reporting: Staying on top of what’s happening and being informed about how your search engine health is doing is crucial but time-consuming. Fortunately, there are tools that help automate reporting and keep an eye on the health of your SEO by giving recommendations on how to improve things while they’re happening.
SEO Audit and Analysis Tools You Can Use:
- Raven Tools, for automatically generating SEO reports
- Yoast SEO plugin, to identify on-page SEO issues, with actionable recommendations to resolve them.
SEO Automation Should Make Your Life Easier
The fact of the matter is that automation is here to help us, though we should only implement the tools that will improve our business in the long run. For most companies, a mix of automation and manual SEO practices is the best solution for successful SEO campaigns that improve rankings in the long run. Automation tools are there to help us professionals save time and energy by taking on repetitive tasks, data gathering, and auditing. They can’t replace strategy, but they can make implementation easier. If you’re looking to dive deeper into SEO best practices in the new year, check out more articles on our blog.