The Best Software for SEO Automation
Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process that requires marketers to do a variety of manual tasks. Many entrepreneurs spend long hours on SEO, trying to get it to work properly. Tweaking little things like URL structure and meta descriptions can be time-consuming. Meanwhile, manual keyword search is downright overwhelming.
Business owners mistakenly believe that they need to hire large marketing departments to deal with all aspects of SEO. In reality, a big chunk of work can be done by automation software. If your digital marketing experts aren’t taking full advantage of SEO automation tools, the company could be falling behind the competition.
Let’s take a closer look at SEO automation, why it’s important, and which tools to have in your digital marketing arsenal.
What is SEO Automation?
SEO automation involves taking advantage of tools and software to get some of the manual and repetitive tasks done. Today, hundreds of efficient programs exist to make SEO campaigns faster and easier. Some of the aspects of SEO can’t be done properly without automation.
Some marketers use more automation tools than others. However, the majority of them delegates numerous tasks to the software. While it’s impossible to fully automate the SEO process, some of the tasks must be entrusted to the tools. Otherwise, it can be impossible to achieve high rankings within a reasonable amount of time.
SEO automation tools are designed to simplify SEO tasks without taking the human touch out of the process. With their help, you can minimize tedious manual efforts and focus on the aspects of your campaign, which require creativity and organizing.
SEO Processes That Can Be Automated
Here are a few processes that you can automate by using SEO automation tools. Keep in mind that all of these tasks still require human optimization, tracking, and analysis. However, the majority of the manual aspects can be delegated to a program.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the pillar of SEO. When you start searching for keywords, brainstorming is just a part of the process. You can use SEO tools to identify keywords your website and your website’s competitors rank for. Then you can feed the information into the keyword research tool and get a list of keywords to work with.
You can also take advantage of automation tools that continuously check your competition’s keywords, figure out how well they rank, and suggest these options to implement into your SEO campaign.
2. Website Monitoring
To achieve search engine optimization results, you need the website to work impeccably. To ensure its efficiency, you need to monitor the site’s technical capabilities. You can dedicate site monitoring to an SEO automation tool. The program can check for such metrics as:
Page loading time
Website uptime
By automating the website monitoring process, you can eliminate manual checks. Meanwhile, you’ll be alerted immediately if the site is down or the loading speed decreases substantially. Then you can react quickly to eliminate downtime and improve your SEO efforts.
3. Looking for Broken Links
Bad links can be highly detrimental to the rankings of your website. They create a poor user experience, causing visitors to close the page and never come back to the website again Meanwhile, these links make your website less appealing to search engines when determining its place in search results.
Checking for broken links manually is time-consuming and frustrating. To keep your website in top shape, you need to do it regularly. Instead of wasting your time, it’s possible to automate this process.
For example, Google Analytics does an excellent job tracking website performance and uncovering bad links. The system will identify locations of broken links, allowing you to set up redirects easily.
4. Rank Tracking
The key goal of search engine optimization is to put your website on top of the SERPs (search engine results pages). All SEO tasks are aimed at achieving high rankings.
To check how well you are doing with SEO, you need to track your rankings. Doing it manually is tedious and inefficient, especially if your website has hundreds of pages. Meanwhile, delegating the task to a SEO automation tool can streamline the process tremendously.
SEO automation tools like SE ranking helps track pages’ rankings. With these tools, you don’t just evaluate your search engine optimization efforts but catch errors in time to fix them without hurting the marketing budget.
5. Backlink Monitoring
Backlink profile is one of the SEO pillars. To get high rankings, you need to build high-quality backlinks. Meanwhile, low-quality backlinks can hurt your reputation and hinder your SEO strategy. Checking your backlinks regularly can be tough. Delegating this task to automation tools can save you time.
By having a tool check your backlink profile, you can keep track of which sites link to yours and eliminate poor and irrelevant backlinks immediately. This information can also help streamline backlink analysis and adjust backlinking tactics.
6. Content Optimization
When it comes to search engine optimization, content is always king. While you can’t use SEO automation software for writing content, you can optimize what you have with SEO in mind. No matter how valuable content is for the users, it can’t help with SEO unless you tweak it to be more appealing to the search engines.
This involves creating meta tags, coming up with clear URLs, adjusting internal linking, and much more. While you can do this on your own, it’s easy to make mistakes or overlook important points.
All of the above can be delegated to the SEO automation tool. While tools won’t change your content, they can provide valuable suggestions. They help you optimize blog posts, website content, landing pages, and any other content on your website to improve SEO and content marketing efforts.
7. Reporting and Measurements
Reporting and analytics are highly important to search engine optimization. Proper SEO analysis is often the only way to figure out if your efforts are working. Numerous SEO automation tools allow you to generate SEO reports to help you see where you stand.
By analyzing your SEO efforts continuously, you can tweak your campaign timely and avoid costly mistakes. It can be tough to create a comprehensive report manually without losing too much time. If you have to choose one SEO automation tool, make sure it has stellar reporting capabilities.
8. Monitoring the Competition
Your success in digital marketing depends on how well you know your competition. Competition monitoring is important for SEO since it allows you to make changes to your campaign according to what works for your competition and what doesn’t.
By taking advantage of SEO automation tools to set up competitor monitoring, you can save time while getting valuable information on a regular basis.
8 SEO Automation Tools to Keep in Your Arsenal
Let’s take a look at which tools can help you automate SEO and get your website to the top of Google search results.
1. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is one of the most used SEO automation programs since it has a comprehensive set of features. Besides a solid rank tracking functionality (as the name suggests), this tool assists with:
Keyword research
Backlink monitoring
Competitor research
Rank tracking
Website audit
On-page checks
Social media management
And much more
You can get a wide variety of data with this tool to use for your SEO and other digital marketing efforts. It’s designed for both newbies and experienced marketers.
The program has excellent customer support. Users can get instantaneous responses and detailed answers to a variety of questions. SE ranking is a SaaS, so you pay monthly or annually depending on your subscription.
2. SEMRush
No matter how long you’ve been in the digital marketing realm, you probably know about SEMRush. This comprehensive software offers a wide variety of options to help with search engine optimization efforts. This highly popular SEO program can help with tasks like:
Keyword research
On-page SEO
Tracking rankings
Competitor analysis
Local SEO
Link building
Social media management
Content optimization
Content marketing analytics
Besides SEO functionality, SEMRush also helps with other aspects of marketing like PPC. The program provides you all the necessary data to improve your search engine optimization efforts and gain valuable insight into your tactics.
3. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog has a solid variety of features that can improve your search engine optimization efforts. The tool is easy to use. It can be integrated with Google Lighthouse and Google Search Console. Screaming Frog can help you with:
Site launch audit
Sitemap building
Site crawling
Metadata analysis
Content optimization
Broken links search
Audit redirects
Identify duplicate content
The downside of this program is that it’s not cloud software. While it’s not an all-encompassing tool like the above two, Screaming Frog can provide valuable insight into the way search engines see your website so you can make timely adjustments and streamline your SEO tasks.
4. Ahref’s
Ahref’s automation software can help you with tasks like:
Keyword discovery for 10 search engines. Ahref’s Keyword Explorer also gives you an opportunity to see the estimated number of clicks on search results.
Search traffic estimation for the 10 top ranking pages
Extensive daily backlink monitoring
Explore competitors’ website (with Ahref’s Site Explorer)
Analyze click distribution for each keyword
Content Gap Analysis (with Ahref’s Content Gap) for checking competitor’s keyword rankings and comparing them to your own.
Monitor outbound links
Ahref’s can automate a variety of tasks while helping with other aspects of SEO. Depending on the tasks you want to delegate, you can choose a pricing plan to suit your needs.
5. Ubersuggest
Ubrsuggest is a free keyword tool. It helps you discover new keywords and generate keyword ideas. Designed by a renowned digital marketer Neil Patel, this software can help you automate keyword searches while finding new content ideas.
Besides offering you keywords to work with, this tool helps you see how each keyword’s search volume has been changing over the past year. It can also tell you how many backlinks you need to rank on the first page for a particular keyword.
Ubersuggest gives you a deep insight into each suggested keyword, helping you understand which of them are worth your effort.
6. AnswerThePublic
This free program is highly valuable for generating content ideas. All you need to do is feed it keywords and find out a variety of information to help you create content. Each search term comes back with questions, comparisons, prepositions, and related terms.
This is one of the best automated SEO tools on the market today. While it seems simple and straightforward, AnswerThePublic is a big time-saver for content marketers and SEO experts.
7. Google Search Console
No matter how many tools you use for automated SEO, you need to take full advantage of Google Search Console. This program is free. It allows you to monitor your website and report your site’s presence to Google.
The Search Console provides a variety of information you can use for your automation needs, including:
Number of clicks
Number of impression
Average CTR
Average position
It can also help you build sitemaps, check backlinks, monitor mobile usability, and much more.
8. SERPRobot
SERPRobot helps you monitor your website’s rankings on search engine result pages. This rank tracker can help you see how well your SEO tactics are working. It’s a quick, affordable, and straightforward tool, which can be an excellent addition to your SEO automation arsenal.
The Takeaway
Automation is an integral part of search engine optimization. By taking full advantage of the available software, it’s possible to stay on top of your game and on top of the SERPs. Without automating manual and repetitive tasks, it can be tough to achieve timely SEO results, thus hindering your entire marketing campaign.