Every online marketing professional worth their salt knows that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial to one’s online presence. By understanding engine algorithms, one can finetune content and posts to garner more visibility, much like understanding design helps you to create a more eye-catching poster.
To do this, one must understand the search engine eco-system and the metrics that one must measure and track, such as listing movement, popularity, traffic and more. But with such an extensive array of markers to observe, SEO automation is often inserted into parts of this exercise to streamline the work process.
WHAT IS SEO AUTOMATION?
SEO automation is the process of taking chosen repetitive or simple tasks used to determine metrics and fully or semi-automating them with softwares and applications instead of manually.
This not only is much faster, but frees up resources to focus on human-centric tasks such as creative implementation and marketing calls.
WHAT TYPES OF SEO TASKS CAN BE AUTOMATED?
Not all SEO tasks can be automated. Here are some examples of those you can apply SEO automation on.
Rank Tracking: When one types in a keyword on a search engine, personalised searches add multiple considerations such as geolocation, previous searches and social interactions are added to produce a more relevant result to the particular user. So when looking are purely keywords, it is better to check on its impact through rank tracking, which also detects trends and performance.
Site Audit: Periodically auditing a website for its SEO is important to detect trends to adjust strategies and update it to prevalent rules. This could be for technical errors or optimisation. Items that can be monitored include page speed load, comprehensive technical SEO issues like duplicate content or titles, missing meta tags, broken images and links, bad sitemaps and server errors.
Backlink Analysis: Also known as inbound links or incoming links, backlinks are links from anchor words from other websites. It is important to have SEO automation monitor these backlinks as those that come from disreputable sources can actually bring down SEO.
8 SEO AUTOMATION TOOLS
There is a wide market of SEO automation tools that can help with the varying aspects described above and more.
1. SEMrush
This is really a suite of tools that can assist you with anything from keyword research and competitor analysis to content marketing. It describes itself more as a digital team member, and with its highly-developed tools and user-friendly design honed over 14 years, it’s not that much of a stretch. You can sign up for a 7-day free trial and if it suits your needs, you can join the bigwigs like IBM, Tesla, Forbes and Amazon when you use their services.
2. Screaming Frog
With their tongue-in-cheek name, the SEO Spider is a website crawler that audits your site by trawling through data and common SEO issues to help you spot and improve onsite SEO. Find basic SEO no-nos easily – broken links and duplicate content – or perform advanced tasks to allow for site architecture visualisation. With up to 500 URLs and most basic functions for free, it’s a great tool to start your investigations with.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs, like many other SEO automation tools, also provides practical features such as link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health monitoring. Their Lite programme starts at $99 a month for tools like backlinks and keyword ranking checker, keywords explorer, site audit and rank tracking, while standard packages at $199 a month include tools for SERP updates for advanced keyword metrics and content analysis for marketing. You can count yourself in good company, with Facebook, Tripadvisor, Netflix and Shopify as users, and this business started in 2010 is always innovating, with reports as a feature coming out next.
4. Deepcrawl
Deepcrawl comes with a nice introduction video for those new to SEO automation, but it’s not just a fancy sell. The service prides itself as an enterprise-level intelligence tool, and is neatly divided into three segments. Their Monitor Hub allows users to observe sites on a high-level and alerts one to potential errors or trends. The Analytics Hub is the crawler tool and dashboard to technical SEO analytics to guide optimisation. The last is the Automation Hub, where 200 automated SEO tests which protect the site’s technical health by spotting SEO errors.
5. SE Ranking
SE Ranking presents a full demo account on its homepage so you instantly get to browse through their SEO software and see what it can do. Nifty! It also provides good value with one of the most included features at one of the lowest prices around ($31.20 a month for the lowest Essential tier) and is great for those who may not necessarily know what they need at first.
6. SEO PowerSuite
The site is created in a very no-nonsense way and very much is in SEO PowerSuite to be straightforward with its products as well. They offer four tools: A Rank Tracker for keyword research, a WebSite Auditor for on-page and technical SEO audits, an SEO SpyGlass for backlink research, and a LinkAssistant for link building and outreach. The good thing about this service is that you can try it for 7 days or have an unlimited free function with limited capabilities, so it’s also great for those starting out in the SEO automation space.
7. ContentKing
It plugs real-time monitoring and auditing capabilities on its site and if you own a massive online presence, this might be very useful to keep those SEO parameters in check. It boasts 24/7 monitoring on the cloud, and has advanced algorithms to inform actionable insights and tasks that can be useful for optimising a content-rich site. If you’re feeling a little lost, look through their case studies or pick out the highlights from their neatly categorised solution by industry and roles.
8. SentiOne
To know what’s trending or relevant online, there’s no better place to listen than on social media platforms. This platform offers AI-based online listening robots to consume tweets and posts alike and report on insights relevant to the business. This is especially crucial for those building their brand as it can monitor presence and activity, while preventing crisis situations or negative reputation actions with timely alerts. Social listening can also feed into SEO-making decisions as it can be an indirect ranking factor.
Bonus: Python for SEO
Those familiar with the programming language can actually create scripts to do what the above SEO automation apps are doing as well. It’s great for crawling through sites and helping you automate tasks such as file naming, alt tags, and meta descriptions.
