How to Automate Your SEO for Top Ranking

Making the decision to automate tasks that you have been painstakingly carrying out by hand until now is not one that can be taken lightly. Of course, you do not want to jeopardize the quality of your SEO or lose any improvement in ranking that you have achieved.

Therefore, it can be beneficial to lay out the pros and cons of each method of conducting SEO before you start to look into which elements of SEO you can automate.

• 100% control over your search and SEO strategies
• You can handpick high-quality backlinks

• The process is time consuming
• It requires dedication to the task at hand
• It requires a lot of manpower
• It takes time to implement
• It’s not feasible for large websites

• It is faster
• It is cheaper – in the short term
• It can carry out tedious tasks such as SEO audits
• You can access up-to-date data on your keyword rankings
• The process of analysis is simpler

• The risk of getting low-quality backlinks is higher
• Some SEO software relies on quantity over quality
• It can be expensive in the long term

Whichever option you choose, or a combination of both, the most important thing to remember is you need to feel confident in the decisions that you make for your business and its ability to rank higher on Google.

Not sure exactly what elements you can and should be automating when it comes to SEO?

Don’t worry.

Keep reading to discover the top 6 processes of SEO that you can automate to make optimizing your website faster, simpler, and more effective.

As briefly mentioned above, there are certain SEO practices that do not lend themselves well to automation. This is mainly because they need originality and that personal touch in order to be effective. However, there are still plenty of SEO tasks that can be outsourced to an online tool or piece of clever software.

If you ask a marketer, or indeed a business owner, where they start when it comes to SEO, most will say keyword research. As it is the foundation of any effective SEO strategy, this process can be quite long winded, not to mention the fact that it needs to be carried out each and every time you want to create new content for your site.

Fortunately, this is one SEO process that can be automated with surprisingly good results.

A great place to start is always with Google Keyword Planner as it allows you to search keywords and see how they might perform. This free online tool is super easy to use and provides consistent outcomes.

All you need to do is navigate to the “Find Keywords” page and then enter the specific product or service that are closely related to your business. You can add multiple keywords to this section, simply add a comma after each and press enter.

For a more detailed keyword research automated solution, the SEMrush tool can be used to:

• Identify your competitors’ top-ranking keywords
• Observe position changes on domains
• Discover long tail keywords

The SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool allows you to sort through thousands of keywords without the need to sieve through multiple spreadsheets, saving you time and arguably your sanity too!

If you are a new website and you are waiting for Google to index your site so that you can start rising in the ranks of SERPs, backlinks are a great way to get the ball rolling in terms of kickstarting your SEO efforts.

Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links from one website to another. When ranking a site Google values the number of high-quality backlinks that a site has, and therefore, backlinks are a crucial element of search engine optimization.

That being said, keeping track of the amount and quality of backlinks that your site is receiving can be a time-consuming process. Fortunately, there is also a handy online tool that can do this for you.

Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker has the ability to crawl 7.4 billion web pages every day and has an index of 3 trillion known URLs. Even with the best will in the world, a human could never compete with this technological tool when it comes to backlink analysis.

All you need to do is enter your domain or URL and then you can automatically set the service to monitor how well you are ranking in search.

Here is an example using Amazon

As you can see, you can choose to search by your top 100 backlinks or by your top pages. Plus, you can find out your overall domain rating.

You can also get access to alerts for:

• New keywords
• Lost or broken backlinks
• Brand mentions

Plus, don’t miss out on checking out what your competitors are up to. Ahrefs can also help you see what content is receiving the best backlinks within your niche and where your competitors’ links are coming from.

One of the biggest bugbears that people have when trying to carry out SEO is that there are just so many different elements you need to keep track of, such as analytics, rankings, advertising campaigns, and so much more. This involves the use of multiple dashboards which can be confusing as well as time consuming.

This is where the beauty of Cyfe comes into play. This all-in-one business dashboard allows you to keep track of all your vital marketing metrics including both SEO and SEM metrics. The main benefits of Cyfe are its:

• Monitoring functions
• Pre-built widgets
• Reporting functions

With this multi-tasking SEO tool, you can also easily monitor your social media profiles, email marketing channels and web analytics, providing you with a comprehensive insight into your entire business and its performance in terms of SEO and ranking.

By using its pre-built widgets, you can draw information from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SalesForce; plus, through the use of custom widgets you can bring in information from homegrown databases. Basically, there is very little you can’t do with this dashboard software.

As with any aspect of SEO, you will also want to be able to see what your competitors are up to and, lo and behold, Cyfe allows you to do this too! Within the Cyfe competitor dashboard widgets, you can monitor all your competitors’ content, email, and social media strategies at the click of a button.

Don’t think this software can get any more amazing?

Once you have configured all your widgets, you can sign up for SMS alerts that will let you know when anything of note occurs, meaning you can get on with the day-to-day running and strategizing of your business, safe in the knowledge that the monitoring and tracking of your and your competitors’ SEO efforts is being delivered directly to your phone.

The only downside to Cyfe is that it is a paid-for service, although you can enjoy a free trial for a limited amount of time. Fortunately, if you are looking for a free tool that you can connect to your website to help you discover critical metrics such as search result CTR and page impressions, then Google Search Console is the answer.

If you feel like Google is always creating ways to make your SEO journey more difficult (i.e. what is it with the constantly changing algorithms?), you will be happy to know that they have created a completely free online tool that can help you achieve a comprehensive SEO analysis at a few clicks of a button.

Whether you want an overall impression of your business’ organic profile or you want advice on how to improve your search engine presence, Google Search Console can help.

To start, all you need to do is either enter your domain name or URL and then click on the “Performance” tab. This will give you a complete and detailed overview of your website’s performance in SERPs.

With all this accurate data, you can then start to optimize your site including your meta descriptions and title tags to improve your website ranking and increase your organic reach.

You can also utilize the “Queries” tab to see what exact terms are being used to find your website and the pages within it. With this information you can then target these to increase the organic traffic to your site even more.

Finally, you can opt for Google Search Console to send you alerts and recommendations about how you can improve your search presence. These will include SEO elements such as:

• Page speed
• Mobile friendliness
• Sitemap
• Links
• Indexing

Sharing on social media is crucial for boosting your SEO as it offers the opportunity for more people to see your content and become more exposed to your brand. That being said, posting consistent and high-quality content on all your different social media platforms can be incredibly time consuming.

Automating your social media posting can help you:

• Get more results with less effort
• Communicate and engage consistently and relevantly with your followers
• Save time by only needing to schedule once

When it comes to sharing on your socials, you want to ensure that the content you are delivering offers real value to your followers, whether that be to entertain, educate or provide a way to save money on your products or services. Plus, you need to make sure that only a small amount of your posts are self-promotional to avoid users feeling like just another customer rather than a valued part of your brand community.

One of the best ways to use automation when it comes to social media posting is by choosing an online tool that can manage and schedule your content for you. Buffer is arguably one of the best software apps for managing accounts across social media platforms, providing scheduling for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Need help sourcing content ideas?

There is an app for this too. Feedly lets you discover sources of rich, high-quality content that will keep your publishing calendar full all month long. Currently the world’s most popular RSS and blog reader, this app allows you to customize, organize, and share stories with your content team with ease, meaning you will never be stuck for ideas for your next blog or post.

As you can see below, you can choose to search by topic, website or RSS link. Plus, you can sign up for keyword alerts and customize by your preferred social media news platform.

Ways in which you can automate your social media posts for maximum results include:

• Focus on variety. Although you can simply share your content headlines, it can make far more interesting reading if you plan a variety of different messages for each feed such as questions, quotes, sound bites, and anecdotes. If you struggle to create catchy headlines, you may want to try using a Headline Analyzer
• Consider the mechanics of each network. Think about the number of characters, whether hashtags are needed, the type of content that is appropriate, and how you can optimize visuals for each type of social platform.

Decide when to post. There are optimal times of day to post on each individual social platform for achieving the best results. Online social media scheduling tool CoSchedule has a feature that allows you to choose the exact time of day that your content is shared on each network, enabling you to reach as many of your followers as possible.

Technical SEO is often thought of as the most time consuming and long-winded of the three SEO practices due to its technical elements and jargon-rich fundamentals. That said, it is a vital part of SEO as it helps search bots to crawl and index your site better, both of which are crucial for ensuring that Google and other search engines can rank you as high as possible.

Thankfully, there are some handy freemium SEO automation software programs that can help you to improve the technical aspects of your website such as locating error codes, indexing issues, duplications and areas that you can improve upon such as site structure and meta data.

Screaming Frog is a piece of software that you can download and run straight from your computer. Ideal for those who feel daunted by carrying out a technical SEO audit manually, Screaming Frog will conduct a full technical audit in a matter of minutes and provide you with your site’s results in a simple spreadsheet that is easy to understand.

Furthermore, you can plug in to other tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics for a more thorough analysis of your website and choose to filter your search by individual aspects of technical SEO such as HTML, header tags, meta tags and so much more.

As well as automating the process of a technical SEO audit, you can also choose to automate several other elements of technical SEO such as page loading speed and the mobile friendliness of your site.

When ranking your site, Google will take into consideration how fast your pages load as they know that their users do not want to wait more than a few seconds to access the information they are searching for.

Therefore, when analyzing the technical SEO of your website, you need to make sure your site and page speed is as fast as possible. Of course, you can check this manually yourself.

However, by using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, your site will be given a score of 0-100. With anything over 85 indicating a well-performing page, your site’s speed will not only be analyzed, but you will also be provided with optimization suggestions.

Here is an example of what you will see when using this tool:

As you can see, Amazon have been given a speed score of 70, which although good, definitely has room from improvement. Fortunately, Google has provided specific examples of how they can make their site faster:

As you can see, Amazon have been given a speed score of 70, which although good, definitely has room from improvement. Fortunately, Google has provided specific examples of how they can make their site faster:

It is crucial that you ensure your site is secure, both for your users and for search engines. You can achieve this by ensuring that your website has an SSL certificate which will be marked by the use of “https” in your URL. It will also be identified as such when the Google Chrome browser labels your site as secure.

In terms of automation, it can be a good idea to install security software or use a monitoring tools such as Wormly that checks your site for vulnerabilities.

Responsiveness

In this day and age, your site needs to be mobile friendly. This means it can be displayed correctly on a hand-held device such as a smart phone or tablet. If you have built a responsive website, then you shouldn’t have any problem with this element of technical SEO. However, it is always worth checking that every aspect of your site is mobile friendly including any new pages you have added.

You can check the mobile friendliness of your site using the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool. All you need to do is type in your URL and you will be given a score as to how mobile friendly your site is, plus tips on how to improve it.

When trying to get your brand in front of as many eyes as possible, especially if you are a new business, it can be a good idea to tap into existing audiences within your niche that other people have already built. These people are called influencers.

Building a strong and long-lasting relationship with the right influencers can help you do the following:

• Build brand awareness
• Reach your target audience
• Improve your ROI
• Build trust
• Enrich your content creation
• Boost your SEO ranking

That said, many businesses fail to follow through with an effective influencer outreach strategy due to time constraints as well as a lack of knowledge on how to find the right influencers and how to write compelling outreach emails.

This is where influencer marketing research tools come into their own. There are several online tools that you can choose from when it comes to conducting influencer marketing research:

As the name suggests, BuzzStream helps to create a “buzz” around your business and build strong relationships with the best influencers for your brand. Some of the best features of BuzzStream include:

• A browser extension that provides in-depth research into websites, such as more information on the person behind a blog
• Keywords that allow you to find influencers related to your niche
• Help with writing personalized outreach influencer emails

You can enjoy a trial of BuzzStream for free.

BuzzSumo is a great tool for discovering your competitors’ top content and for locating the most popular content for specific topics. You can also use it to:

• Search Twitter bios and shared content to find relevant influencers
• Search by influencer, blogger, company, or journalist

You can enjoy limited searches for free or unlimited searches from $99 per month.

Similar to BuzzStream, NinjaOutreach is a full service cloud-based influencer research tool that allows you to search for prospective influencers and bloggers from over 25 million websites.

The best features of NinjaOutreach include:

• The ability to search Twitter and Instagram
• A browser extension that allows you to see information about a website while you are carrying out your normal daily browsing
• Tags that allow you to organize your list of prospective influencers
• Tracking of details such as number of outreach emails, clicks and replies
• The choice to automate your entire email sequence

You can enjoy a free 14-day trial of NinjaOutreach, but then prices start from $69 per month.

Although it can be a good idea to automate some elements of influencer outreach, make sure that you do not let the process of automation get in the way of the personal touch that is required when reaching out and trying to build a long-lasting and mutually beneficial working relationship. Using software to locate the right influencers and find out about them is one thing, but sending out mass, impersonal outreach emails will not do you any favors, or help you make the right friends.

As with most aspects of life, there is no easy, one-size-fits-all way to carry out SEO on your website. Even if you do choose the faster route of automation, you still have to use multiple tools and software to help you achieve the desired results.

Therefore, why not consider hiring an SEO agency instead?

When you choose to hire SEO specialists to optimize your website and improve your overall ranking, you know that they will be 100% dedicated to your campaign. They will know exactly what automation tools to use for optimal results, plus, which elements of SEO should be carried out by hand.

Other benefits of enlisting the services of an SEO agency include:

• Saving you time. As a business owner your time is precious. Wouldn’t you rather be strategizing for the future rather than spending hours, and even days, researching and implementing an SEO strategy?
• Driving better results. The process of SEO is constantly evolving with Google algorithm updates happening several times a day. An SEO agency has experience running SEO campaigns and will be aware of any changes and how they can affect your site’s ranking.
• Access to resources. Although you can find free resources and SEO automation tools online, if you want an in depth and complete picture of your site’s performance you will need to subscribe to multiple services. An SEO agency will have access to the best resources needed to create a high-performing SEO campaign that will effectively grow your business online.

Do SEO automation tools have a place in a well-managed SEO campaign?

Yes, of course, they do. SEO automation can save you time and money as you try to move your site up the ranks of Google. Plus, it allows you to avoid some of the more monotonous tasks associated with SEO such as backlink analysis and keyword research.

That being said, if you want complete precision and a guarantee that your site is being optimized in the best way possible, you will also need to embrace manual SEO and the possibility of professional help in the form of an SEO agency.

The future of SEO is promising with video marketing, improved content, and local searches all being key elements in its development in 2020 and beyond. However, it is up to you to make sure that your site stays relevant in terms of SEO and continues to rise in the SERPs.

You never know, 2021 could be the year that your site not only gets on the first page of Google, but that also becomes a Featured Snippet, gets on the Local Maps section, or links within the Related Questions widget!