SEO Automation: The Ultimate Guide For 2019

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is an ever-changing activity that gives quite some headaches to bloggers and website owners around the world. If organic traffic is the main way your website relies on getting new users, you know very well that SEO is not a piece of cake. Every year, Google comes up with some algorithm adjustments that usually messes up with the previous year strategy.

For website owners, who cannot rely on an SEO agency, obtaining effective SEO results requires constant hard work. Putting an emphasis on this, however, doesn’t always result in immediate outcomes. For this reason, many decide to shift their attention to more controllable factors and let SEO be, hoping that somehow it will work.

Should You Still Focus On SEO in 2019

Considering the hard work and the little chances to succeed against bigger players, it might be reasonable to ask yourself, why. If you have little resources, should you still put an effort in trying to rank higher in Google or any other search engine?

Obviously, the answer is yes!

Organic traffic will outperform any paid campaigns on search engines by 5.66 times. On top of that, if you still think it might be wiser to invest money in paid ads rather than SEO, you need to consider that nearly 80% of online users ignore those sponsored ads in search results.

Remember that ranking on search engines requires a long time and hard work. It won’t happen overnight. The key to being successful in the SEO game is to dedicate each week some time to it. If you don’t see results at the beginning, and you won’t, don’t despair, just keep working on it.

How To Focus On SEO Without Losing Sight Of The Bigger Picture?

As a website owner or blogger, you might think that there is not enough time to do everything. You are alone or part of a small team and the tasks are too many. SEO won’t bring results tomorrow, so how can you successfully keep working on it while everything else happens?

SEO is not made of just one activity. There are several things you need to take into consideration when optimizing your website for SEO. Content creation, keywords optimization, off-page, and on-page optimization, long-tail keywords, influencer outreach, and link-building are just some of the things you need to consider when working on your SEO strategy.

Online resources can help you identify what makes the most sense for you to focus on, however, implementing those activities is the toughest part of the plan. SEO success is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into it.

The good news is that some of these activities can be automated to free up your time from some boring tasks.

What SEO Activities Can You Automate?

Automation won’t help you achieve better results faster, however, it will help you dedicate some of your time to other growth areas. Using automation tools is one of the best hacks that you can implement in your strategy to do more with fewer resources.

    1. SEO Analysis

“Analysis paralysis” is a well-known issue not only in the SEO world. When we need to analyze too many things, we tend to overthink on what to do next, which leads to not taking any action at all. With SEO, you might find yourself analyzing tons of data and get stacked into “what’s next” decision, especially when SEO is not your area of expertise.

For this reason, automating SEO analysis can free up quite a lot of time from your daily activities. Easily understanding how to optimize your on-page SEO as well as off-page activities can be a life-saver.

Yoast SEO Plugin

Google Search Console

Woorank

HubSpot Website Grader

Moz offers several paid SEO tools that help website owners understand how to improve their SEO strategy. There are, however, also free tools, such as the Moz SEO Toolbar. This is a simple add-on that quickly helps to analyze any website. Although it doesn’t give you any suggestion per se on what to do or how to fix it, the tool helps to easily identify where problems might be.

    2. Influencer Research

As part of improving your SEO results, you will need to make sure to reach out to relevant influencers in your industry to share the content created. Making good use of influencers can increase your website social presence and shares across different platforms. However, reaching out to influencers can be a daunting task. Sending hundreds of emails hoping for an answer is not a scalable activity.

Social Animal

Social Animal is another widely used tool very similar to BuzzSumo. It helps website owners and marketers understand how certain topics are shared across different social media. The tool also helps to find out influencers per keyword.

NinjaOutReach

This tool focuses exclusively on identifying influencers per keyword searched. Like others, it also helps you find the most shared content online, however, its power is on the influencer research. When performing a query, users will also be able to find email addresses and other contact information, which make the outreach activity extremely simple.

SentiOne

SentiOne is a social listening tool for bloggers and website owners that help to identify interesting content that is shared online as well as brand mentions. When working on influencers outreach, users might want to focus on those who are already familiar with their brand. This tool helps to find out exactly this.

3. Keywords and Backlinks Monitor

When it comes to SEO, one of the most important things to do, constantly, is to check how well you rank for certain keywords as well as who is linking to your website. Keeping an eye on the best keywords will help you understand what to focus on for new content creation. On the other side, understanding which website is linking to your content can help you identify potential partners as well as understanding what content gets the most attention.

Doing this without manually, however, requires several hours (to be optimistic) and it can be difficult to get a good picture of what to do with the results. Automating this task can help you save time and make better decisions.

Best Automation Tools For Keywords and Backlinks Monitor

SE Ranking

Moz

Semrush

Semrush allows users to identify your competitor’s best keywords, observe position changes in domains, uncover long tail keywords for websites and for PPC campaigns. By combining the tools available for keywords research, website owners can uncover long-tail keywords without dealing with multiple spreadsheets.

Ahrefs

Like other keywords and backlinks monitor tools, Ahrefs’ solution helps users understand what are the best keywords available for volume, ranking and it also offers alternative suggestions. The tool includes several options for website owners and marketers to easily analyze competitors’ activities, new or lost backlinks as well as brand mentions to work on a proper SEO strategy.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog has been designed for SEO/SEM-minded marketers. There’s a free desktop version available for download where users can easily analyze URLs for common SEO issues. It is a blessing from the sky, considering that if you have a fairly large website, such analysis could take hours, if not days.

Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite helps website owners in managing social media activities, from social sharing to keywords tracking. The main benefit is that users have one single place to access all their social media profiles, which saves quite a lot of time.

SproutSocial

Sprout Social has a cleaner dashboard compared to its competitors. In addition to the usual features, if there are more than one users accessing the tool, there are simple customizations available to assign tasks to each team members. It comes also with in-depth analytics connected with Google Analytics, setting the tool apart from many of its kind.

TweetDeck

This is a completely free tool aimed at managing an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. Although specific for Twitter alone, the level of customization is so high that is worth a mention. It can also be downloaded as desktop software and it has integration with Buffer.

Social Pilot

This tool helps users automate social media postings across different social media platforms. If users have an eCommerce website, SocialPilot actually automates the product additions to different websites. It comes with a Google Chrome extension and it has over 300 integrations

Conclusion
SEO is a tough nut to crack. It requires time and effort to master and eventually see some results. SEO automation tools become crucial as the activities to track increase daily. Although all these solutions are here to save time (and money eventually), you still need to take care of them and invest resources. Your SEO strategy gets better and easier to develop with all these excellent tools, however, it’s crucial to understand that just using some of these won’t make your life easier. As a matter of fact, it’s best to check first what makes sense for you to implement in your day-to-day activities and slowly start automating some tasks. If you blindly add more tools to the mix, you might actually end up wasting more time.

Author Bio:  Luca is an experienced sales executive and business coach with a background of over 10 years in sales and management. When not working, Luca runs one of the leading online magazines for startup knowledge, MyStartupLand, with the aim of providing meaningful and helpful content to startup founders and business people. You can also find him on Twitter & Facebook