It’s no secret that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for your online visibility, search engine ranking and website traffic.
However, to continuously optimize the performance of your website, you need to conduct regular audits to find and fix errors and broken links, which can be tedious, slow and often expensive.
Here’s the good news: SEO automation can work for you even while you sleep.
Automating SEO tasks can help you find issues in real time so you can make the changes needed to constantly improve and maintain your site’s ranking, while reducing both the time and money it takes to do so.
We’ll cover everything you need to know about SEO automation, including the tasks it can help with and some of the top tools you can utilize to help you with your website SEO.
Table of Contents
What Is SEO Automation?
Search engine optimization (SEO) automation is the process of automating simple repetitive tasks related to your search engine optimization strategy, that you typically perform manually.
The use of automated SEO software:
- Reduces the amount of manual work
- Helps you speed up tedious tasks
- Frees time for working on various search engine optimization tactics and their creative aspects
- Gives you insights about how to fix your SEO
- Helps you analyze your competitors’ performance and search for ways to outrank them
Manual vs. Automated SEO
With manual SEO, you use one or several SEO experts to manually implement your on-site and off-site SEO strategies.
Although manual SEO gives you total control over your SEO strategy, the process can be costly and time-consuming.
With automated SEO, you implement software or a platform that does the work for you.
So, which option is right for you? That depends on the size of your company, you optimization needs and your budget. Sometimes using a mix of both solutions can bring the best results.
To dive a little deeper into SEO and learn how to improve your ranking, check out our article on free Google SEO tools.
You can use SEO automation tools to analyze your ranking, backlinks and competitors
Which Tasks Can You Use SEO Automation For?
Optimizing your website for search engines is a task that requires time and effort. With SEO automation, you can streamline the process.
SEO automation can be used for the following tasks:
1. Site Monitoring
Site monitoring allows you to check your website for page load time, broken links, unsafe security protocols and messy pages that can affect your ranking on search engines.
Automation tools save time and reduce manual effort to run repeated tests. Once these tools detect a problem, they send you a notification so you can work on a solution.
2. Rank Tracking
With dozens of pages and hundreds of keywords you might be trying to rank for, automation solutions allow you to see the ranking of each individual page so you can come up with a strategy to improve the pages that aren’t performing well.
Once you implement a new tactic, you can see if it is working and adjust accordingly.
3. Backlink Analysis
SEO automation software can analyze your backlinks quickly and easily, so you can see which websites are linking to your website.
The more backlinks, the higher the reliability, authority and ranking.
4. Competitor Monitoring
In addition to using SEO automation on your own website, you can use it to see how your competitors are performing.
This can give you ideas on how to gain a competitive edge and improve your search engine positioning.
Top 8 SEO Automation Tools
1. SEMrush
With 21 international awards for the best SEO software suite, SEMrush has been used by 10 million marketing professionals and 30% of Fortune 500 companies.
SEMrush’s automation tools include:
- Position tracking
- Site audit
- Brand monitoring
- Backlink audit
- Reports to help you focus your efforts on specific areas
A log file analyzer to give you information on the top crawled pages, pages that were not crawled, errors found and more
The subscription plans start with a free version for marketing newbies, a Pro package for $119.95 per month for small businesses and freelancers, a Guru plan at $229.95 for growing teams and marketing departments and $449.95 for large agencies and enterprises.
SEMrush also offers a seven-day free trial period for the paid subscription packages.
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
SEO Spider Tool allows you to crawl 500 URLs for free or buy a license to go beyond this limit and benefit from its advanced features.
SEO Spider Tool helps you:
- Analyze title tags and meta descriptions
- Find broken links
- Audit redirects
- Discover duplicate content
- Schedule audits
The paid version for a year license is $186.02, which gives you access to additional features such as:
- Crawl comparison
- Structured data and validation
- Spelling and grammar checks
- Free technical support
3. Ahrefs
Ahref’s SEO software allows you to:
- Find winning keywords
- Understand how to optimize pages
- Find ways to get and buy backlinks for SEO
- Explore technical suggestions
You can use Ahref’s free SEO checker or sign up for one of the proposed packages. The Lite package is suitable for small businesses and costs $99 per month. The Standard package comes with a monthly fee of $199 and is a good option for in-house marketers and SEO professionals.
The Advanced and Enterprise packages cost $399 and $999, respectively, the first one a good option as your business grows, the second a good option for agencies and enterprises.
You can change your plan per your needs and goals or cancel your subscription anytime.
4. SE Ranking
With over 600,000 users, SE Ranking’s SEO software allows you to optimize and promote your website regardless of your level of expertise.
Features include:
- Keyword rank tracking
- SEO/PPC competitive research
- Website audit
- Backlink checking and monitoring
There are three available pricing packages: Essential at $24.45 per month, Pro at $54.79 per month and Business at $117.17 per month.
You can use the pricing plan calculator to find the right plan for your business. SE ranking also offers a free 14-day trial.
5. DeepCrawl
The SEO automation Hub presented by DeepCrawl is a revolutionary technology that discovers SEO errors using more than 200 automated SEO tests.
DeepCrawls’a automation tools allow you to:
- Align your code and prevent SEO errors
- Speed up the QA process
- Enable faster development cycles
- Save resources on fixing bugs
In addition to the SEO automation hub, DeepCrawl is an analytics hub that can help you:
- Gain technical insights
- Crawl millions of URLs
- Manage issues and workloads
Pricing quotes can be requested along with a demo to explore DeepCrawl’s features and capabilities.
6. SentiOne
Founded in 2011 and trusted by 1,600 brands globally, this deep-tech scaleup uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to support companies in the field of customer service.
Though not an SEO tool per se, SentiOne can help you optimize your website by “listening” to chatters on social sites and notifying you each time your brand is mentioned. This can give you insights on how to reach out and what content to present to your target audience.
This AI customer service automation technology helps you:
- Monitor social media, forums, portals and blogs
- Use bots to automate repetitive processes
- Provide instant reaction time
- Respond on all communication channels 24/7
You can get a quote depending on the specifics of your business and book a demo to test how AI can shape the future of customer service.
7. Sistrix
With customers in over 30 countries, more than 1,000 servers and data from over 100 million domains, Sistrix allows you to:
- Analyze your competitors
- Resolve on-page issues
- Raise organic traffic
- Search Google, Amazon, Instagram and more
The monthly packages start at $99 for beginners and start-ups and can reach $599 for a Premium package, which is recommended for large enterprises and experts.
Sistrix offers free SEO tools such as SERP Snippet Generator, Google Update Radar, Instagram Hashtag Generator and more.
8. Little Warden
Created by a family with over 20 years of experience in the digital marketing industry, Little Warden conducts:
- Expiration checks, including domain name expiration and SSL certificate expiration
- Status checks, including GEO redirect check, URL response check and 404-page redirect check
- Indexability, including X-robots indexability checks and meta-robots indexability checks
- Malware detection checks
- Sitemap checks, including sitemap validation and XML sitemap change monitoring
The monthly plans start at $34.99 for a freelancer and $54.99 for a small team, to $169.99 for a large agency.
Each plan gives you a 30-day money back guarantee, while annual payments let you enjoy two months for free.
Hiring an SEO Agency: An Alternative To SEO Automation
While SEO automation tools focus on the automation of different aspects of your performance, none of them encompasses all of the aspects you need to monitor.
Hiring an SEO agency allows you to leave your optimization to the experts. SEO experts have extensive experience with SEO automation platforms, SEO campaigns and SEO metrics.
They know exactly which metrics to look at and how to interpret them to create a strategy for improved optimization across your site.
Hiring an SEO agency can help you look at your SEO strategy from an expert perspective
Key Takeaways on Search Engine Optimization Automation
Search engine optimization automation allows you to leave tedious repetitive tasks to an SEO software, while reducing time and costs.
Tasks that can be automated include:
- Site monitoring
- Rank tracking
- Competitor monitoring
- Backlink analysis
You can utilize both SEO automation tools and an SEO agency to cover every aspect of your SEO strategy and achieve the results you want — a fully optimized website that ranks in search.
Outsourcing the services of some of the best SEO agencies and specialized digital marketing companies can help you with this.
