If you want your website to be visible, you can’t ignore search engine optimization (SEO).
Why? Because SEO is the driving force behind the flow of internet traffic to your website. The better the SEO score your site has, the more visitors it will get.
Now consider that every one of those people could be a prospective customer, business partner, employee, or many more things. They’re connections that your website needs to grow!
So, the question quickly becomes, how can you improve your website’s SEO? Well, it’s safe to say that you’re not alone in pondering this. In fact, businesses spent $50.89 billion on SEO in 2022, with the industry seeing a growth rate of 21.3% in that year.
One solution is to turn to the power of automating SEO. That way, you can minimize time wasted on manual tasks (and spend more time focusing on the big picture strategy).
Source: WordStream
What is SEO automation?
SEO automation refers to tools that cut down on the time and effort needed to carry out SEO processes.
They can be split into three main categories:
Automating recurring tasks
SEO is not a one-time job. After all, search engines are constantly adapting their processes and algorithms for ranking websites. This means you must regularly scan your website (and rival websites) to stay in the loop on current best SEO practices. Automated tools can handle this on your behalf.
Providing data collection and analysis
Data collection is an especially laborious task to undertake manually.
Since you’re often dealing with huge datasets, the workload can quickly become immense for a human worker. Consider that a VoIP for enterprise system alone often deals with many megabytes of data every minute. You need an automated data collection tool to sift through this. Plus, the data is useful for conducting an analysis of your website’s SEO profile.
Scaling your website
Finally, automation can also help your website project scale faster as you implement large scale and immediate changes that improve how well your website runs.
It allows your software development team to work more effectively by streamlining processes, such as updating/adding internal links and by setting up recurring page crawls that check the health of your site. Automation can also connect you directly with qualified partner leads.
[Ebook] Automating SEO with Oncrawl
7 Types of SEO automation
With those business areas in mind, let’s explore some common types of SEO automation in action today.
Website performance review
One of the basic criteria for a website to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs) is whether the website runs smoothly.
For example, a search engine like Google wants to know how long it takes your webpage to load. To do this, it checks metrics such as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID) to measure whether your website is at an acceptable level and provides a good user experience. According to a study done by Portent, a 0-4 second load time is optimal.
However, many factors could affect this:
- If the website is using a CDN (content delivery network)
- How well the front-end code has been written
- File sizes of text and images
Identifying the source of poor website performance is much easier with tools such as a website auditors. Although the level of analysis will depend on which platform you use, generally, this tool will crawl your site, perform page/meta/content analysis, highlight the areas that need improvement and potentially offer suggestions.
Source: Nibbler
Source: Oncrawl
Website friendliness review
Websites must also be friendly to internet users.
That means your website should be accessible for mobile users. It should offer multiple language options for global audiences. Simply put, anything that will enhance user experience, you should implement. For example, offering high-quality customer service, with site tools like IVR systems, which provide continuous service by routing calls automatically.
Above all, it should also provide proper security measures to protect site visitors, such as enabling HTTPS and SSL on your web servers. If you’re in doubt about this, automated tools, such as SSLTrust or WPScan (for wordpress sites), can analyze your website’s security and identify any issues.
SERP tracking
SEO is an industry that never sleeps.
To keep your website at the top of search pages, you must run constant tests. For example, look at which keywords drive the most traffic to your site, and consider the intent behind them. You could also look at what region your site visitors are from, and what time they visit. For instance, if your business offers social media automation tools and ranks for “Facebook messenger auto reply” keyword, you will be able to use this keyword to rank high on search engines.
Collecting this data is a repetitive and time-consuming task, so using an automated position-tracking or keyword tool is practically compulsory. The first allows you to track your SERP features and their ranking, and the second enables you to research new SERP feature opportunities, so you can continue to improve.
Source: Semrush
Source: Semrush
Backlink analysis
Backlinking is a huge part of SEO.
In simple terms, that means how much search influence your website gets from being referenced on another internet domain. To do this, a search engine creates a profile for every website. Then, if your website is linked from another trusted or popular website, yours will receive some of its search authority (also called ‘link juice’).
This is where automation comes in, as a backlink checker will crawl and index sites linking to your website to allow you to see the quantity and quality of backlinks you have. It will enable you to quickly identify blind spots in your backlink strategy. For example, maybe you haven’t had enough links from media sources or many poor quality sites link to you. In that case, you would know to focus on your press releases and increase the amount of links from sites with high authority!
Competitor backlink analysis
Similarly, your automated SEO tool may also create profiles of competitor websites.
Firstly, it could help identify who your main rivals are, by comparing SERPs for keywords. It could provide insight into what rival websites are doing well, and how and where they are earning clicks. Then you could use this information to improve and adapt your strategy.
Remember, this is all publicly-available data, but few have the tools to see it clearly.
Source: Backlinko
Project management software
Another benefit of automation is that it can improve your team’s SEO workflows.
For example, a project management tool can keep your team well-connected and alert to the main SEO priorities. This massively reduces the hours needed to administer a large SEO project. Although it will take some time to get everyone on board with a new system, it will also create clarity as tasks are clearly assigned and deadlines are automatically coordinated.
There are multiple project management tools you can sign up for, from Asana, which is free and good for small teams, to Basecamp, which works for high-level SEO projects. With some AI tools saving you even more time as they auto-generate tasks, rank them by importance, and then send out custom notifications to the project assignees (using a chatbot script).
Automated SEO lead generation
Finally, automation tools can help scale your business by connecting you directly with more people.
A common technique is to insert a widget onto your webpage that other site owners can click on. For instance, offering an ‘SEO audit’ to prospective business partners. The tool would run this audit automatically, checking their suitability for a backlink partnership, and pass on their details to you. This could run in the background while you attend to other priorities.
Conclusion
To conclude, automation is a powerful tool in any industry. It minimizes work by cutting human hours out of repetitive or laborious tasks. This allows you to get the best out of your employees and maintain a competitive edge over your rivals. At the same time, you will be providing a better customer experience for your website visitors.
