To run a business successfully in the 21st century, you must develop a sound online marketing campaign. Search engine optimization should be at the center of it.
SEO is the practice of using algorithms to drive people to your website. It involves a complex array of virtual systems and structures that have a single aim: clicks on websites owned by your company.
It would be costly and inefficient for members of your workforce or even an independent firm to monitor and manage your SEO operations. You should instead automate as many SEO tasks as you can.
If applied effectively, SEO automation software can significantly improve the efficiency of your SEO process.
What You Can Automate in SEO
You cannot automate everything. But you don’t need to. You just need to automate the most tedious and time-consuming tasks and process. Here are some of the parts you should focus on:
1. Site monitoring
After you launch your new SEO campaign, you will need to monitor it to keep track of how it performs. You will need to figure out ways to improve the site and carry out any maintenance required. It is essential to assess page load time, broken links, site downtime, and other basic housekeeping issues.
This kind of monitoring can be automated. There is software that allows you to set up alerts if something goes wrong with your site. Automation will also help you collect data on your site quickly so that you can put it into action straightaway.
2. Rank tracking
The main reason for developing and implementing SEO algorithms is for your website to rank high when key words and phrases are used in search engines. You will need a way to track this ranking process. But when you have a multitude of sites and hundreds of pages with keywords in them, it is difficult to track each page’s ranking manually. The better option is to automate. Automation software will make it easy for you to see how your pages are doing is search engine rankings. It will also show how your rankings change and improve over time.
3. Backlink analysis
Backlinks are fundamental to your SEO campaign. Backlinks demonstrate the soundness of the content you have published on your sites. They enhance the authority of your brand and boost confidence and trust in your company over time, which leads to an increase in rankings.
You will want the best backlinks for your page. However, you will need to monitor them to ensure their quality. SEO automation simplifies this process. The software you use will make it easier for you to see who is linking to your websites.
4. Competitor monitoring
You are in the most intense competition with other businesses for search engine rankings. The more information you have on your rivals the easier it will be to create SEO algorithms and strategies to outdo them—that is, outrank them.
You may have more competitors than you think. The web is a kind of equalizer when it comes to business. You can be sure that your rivals for search engine rankings go beyond those you are already familiar with. There are probably hundreds of companies that you must contend with. Automating the competitor monitoring process allows you to see the biggest threats to your ranking and develop strategies to keep your business at the top.
5. Site audit
There may be a number of technical issues that prevent your sites from ranking as high as they should. While it is possible to identify such issues through a crawl, this takes a great deal of time. You should instead automate the process. You can set up a crawl program that will do most of the work for you and present the problems that may be holding you back. You can then focus on fixing the issues rather than uncovering them.
6. Reports
Creating and presenting reports is part of managing your business. Financial stakeholders, employees, clients, and prospective clients will all want to know how your business is doing. They will want to know the areas in which your company is strong and those places that need improvement.
Generating reports helps you get the financing and investment you need to operate and expand. It also helps you develop a strategy that will help you meet your business goals. If your company is based entirely online or is heavily dependent on the virtual sphere, your reports will focus mostly on SEO operations. The trouble is that creating these reports is time-consuming. Your executive team cannot spare the time to carry out this task.
Fortunately, report generation is a SEO task that can be automated. You can create a range of different reports, including those covering monthly SEO status, organic search positions, site audits, backlinks, and competitor analysis.
7. Log file analyzer
One of the best ways to assess how search engines interact with your sites is to analyze the log files of your sites. This is a little-known method of figuring out which of your pages are being crawled and which of your pages is the most crawled. It will also help you determine whether your crawl budget is being well-spent.
Use SEO Automation Plugin
When choosing an SEO automation plugin, choose a company that has a strong track record of delivering proven results. The SEO plugin you choose is a crucial decision because it will help streamline SEO tasks. The one we use is called “SEO Press” and is among the top names in the industry.
With SEO Press, you get all the SEO and optimization bells and whistles you need in one plugin. Special features include the ability to manage your titles and to create meta descriptions and meta robots for every post and page.
SEO Press can also improve your search engine crawling by providing XML sitemaps of your posts, pages, and custom post types. And it offers software such as Open Graph tags, Twitter Card, and Google Knowledge Graph to enhance social network sharing.
SEO automation can help you be a better manager, organizer, and entrepreneur—whether you run a growing independent company or you are part of a large and well-established firm.
I hope this post was helpful to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts about your favorite SEO automation tools and which ones you’ve had the most success with? Drop a comment in the box below and let me know!
Getting into Automation and SEO strategy seems to be beyond most small business owners. I think there should be some sort of tips given to everyone once they make a website, perhaps provided by the company making the website. Information like this article should be more widespread and not only shared among a few who get lucky. Small businesses create a foundation dn many of them have struggled to adjust to being online. Also, a list of SEO automation plugins that are from reputable companies would have been a helpful addition to this blog post.
Automation is an underused and extremely valuable resource! If your goal as a creator is to get your content out to as many people as possible in a successful manner then automation is going to be your best friend. It is difficult enough to come up with keywords and produce SEO-friendly content. If automation can tell me my page traffic, website outages, and competitor information then I am all in! That is one less thing I have to worry about. I will say that no amount of monitoring and SEO can make up for creative and engaging content. Start off by making quality content and then worry about your outreach and competition.
Every day I learn a little something new about SEO. When I first started out, I was using the basic settings in the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress websites. Later I learned Yoast has a meta description section in each post and page to fill out individually. It seems so silly now to think I was relying only on the default settings of Yoast. Now when I post an article, I am excited to use the meta description to write a descriptive and useful phrase summarizing the page’s content.
SEO is very important for any website. I haven’t really paid attention to mine because it is spread by word of mouth and I have it listed on a lot of advertising websites. Plus I have my website set up to where if people decide to sell my products they can get a replica of my website with their name on it so they can advertise their website the way they want to but I do believe I will check into this a little more. Thanks for the information.
We’ve been looking to streamline our process and spend less time monitoring all our web activity. I agree that not everything can be automated, but what a difference the time-consuming tasks can make, such as responding to comments and keeping track of our backlinks. I’m especially interested in finding a plug-in that has a proven track record when it comes to reports because this is where we often drop the ball. We’re so focused on our audience; we forget to monitor the numbers.
Taylor,
This was a solid guide into SEO for anyone unfamiliar with how it works. SEO is crucial to a website’s success in today’s digital world. I’m on the fence about automating SEO, simply because I think we may rely too much on software and algorithms to do work for us. However, there a lot of tedious and time-consuming tasks with SEO and automating it could save time for some of your staff members. Competitor monitoring is probably the most important automation tool with SEO, simply because it gives you a better idea of large your competition is. Overall, a decent guide.
I currently write for a parenting website as one of my many blogs and hitting SEOS is important. SEO automation can help run and check on one important aspect of your business. Checking competitor reports against your own can help show where improvement is needed and where you are excelling. Measuring progress is always beneficial. I’m glad you shared the program that you currently use and there was another comment with a suggestion. It gives options for people to look into and the article gives tips to loom for within these options. This was a very beginner friendly option for learning how to utilize all the business skills and optimizations.
I agree that some steps in SEO can be tedious and time consuming. It’s good to know how to do it manually, but if automation tools are available that can streamline the entire process, I’m all for it!
Marketers can spend hours each week trying to improve SEO and adjusting marketing strategies accordingly. For small business owners, those hours may be better spent on developing new products or improving existing services. Automating certain processes can serve as a boon for those with limited time.
Thanks for giving a breakdown of what needs to be done and sharing a tool that can help us get started!
SEO is something that will always and forever be relevant especially as algorithms and technology advance. Thank you for breaking it down for us, I honestly never looked beyond doing my blog tags or tags on my posts. I have to admit, I have employed someone to create blog posts with keywords instead of looking into SEO automation. I will be looking into that automation plug-in! Your post helped me out and I can see how many beginners can use your post as a guide. I also can see how this can help someone who manages multiple websites.
Very crisp SEO guide! It is beneficial to beginners, and I particularly like the rank tracking on keyword research technique, which I will incorporate into my keyword research method.
I am using Little Warden for almost a year now. Managing multiples sites is too time consuming and having this tool that can monitor the sites 24/7 and will just alert me when there is a problem, I love it! Not too mention that it can also be integrated with Google Search Console.