How To Streamline Your SEO Strategy Through Automation

Intro

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of any online marketing strategy. After all, you can’t expect to attract visitors to your website unless you let search engines know where to find it! For your SEO efforts to succeed, however, you need a plan that goes beyond publishing relevant blog posts and building consistent links from authoritative sources. And while manual efforts like creating keyword lists and updating meta tags are essential, it’s also important to streamline your strategy, too. Why? Because time is money.

How To Streamline Your SEO Strategy Through Automation

Spending hours on keyword research, competitor analysis, or creating SEO performance reports can get tiring. These laborious tasks may be vitally important, but they can be energy-sapping and resource-draining, too. If only there was a way to get them done without the huge time commitment.

In this article, we’ll detail how automation can streamline your SEO strategy and other digital marketing efforts. Read on to learn more!

What is automation?

If you’re new to the topic of automation, you’re probably wondering _what it is _and _how _it can help your SEO efforts. To begin with, let’s define what we mean when we talk about automation; specifically automation in business.

Over the last century, automation has crept its way into every industry imaginable. One of the most notable (albeit, old-fashioned) examples of automation is the printing press, but for a more up-to-date instance of automation in action, look no further than the humble ATM. In the simplest terms, automation is the practice of using technology to perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Business automation simply applies this principle to the corporate world.

Common uses of automation within the world of business include:

• Finance and accounting — Companies can free up time for essential tasks like analysis, strategy, and collaboration by automating financial planning and accounting functions. A platform such as Xero, for example, automates the process of sending and paying invoices, calculating VAT returns, claiming expenses, creating purchase orders, and more besides.
• Marketing — Companies can reduce costs through the use of marketing automation software such as Mailchimp. Mailchimp allows businesses to send emails to their customers at predefined times, or enable messaging triggers which are tied to specific customer actions, such as an abandoned cart. Marketing efforts can be integrated directly into a customer relationship management (CRM) system, too.
• HR — Your human resources team may also benefit from automation. Take Bamboo HR, for example: their system allows businesses to easily collect, maintain and analyse their people data, while also managing the onboarding of new employees — all from one central hub.
• Sales — Sales automation tools can increase your team’s efficiency. Automation can be particularly useful for businesses that deal with recurrent sales schedules. For example, ecommerce subscription software by Chargebee not only allows you to automate recurring payments but also provides the tools for you to build a bespoke checkout page, too — perfect for maximising conversions.

How automation can benefit SEO

By using a range of automated tools to execute key tasks, you can save time and focus on what _really _matters: improving your content and building links. Let’s take a look at some of these benefits in more detail.

Keyword research

One of the most important factors of your SEO strategy is keyword research. Identifying keyword opportunities and using them in your on-page SEO efforts is crucial if you plan on climbing the search engine results pages (SERPs).

An automated SEO keyword finder can prove invaluable in the race to discover the most relevant keywords for your website. Keyword finders can also:

• Display a keyword’s history to show you how searcher interest has changed over time
• Help you perform location-specific keyword research (particularly useful if you’re doing business overseas)
• Show you how difficult it may be to rank for a keyword, allowing you to switch tactics if necessary

(Ranktracker’s keyword finder)

Backlink monitoring

Backlinks are simply links from _other _websites that point to _your _website. They’re an essential part of any SEO strategy, and the more quality backlinks you have, the more likely you are to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs). You can monitor your backlink profile by taking note of what links are coming in, where they’re coming from, and their anchor text. The most popular way to do this is through the use of a free tool such as Ahrefs, or a paid backlink monitoring solution like Ranktracker.

There are a few things to keep in mind when monitoring your backlink profile. First, it’s important to track both the quantity and quality of your backlinks. You want to make sure you have enough links to rank well in SERPs, but you also want links that will be useful for your brand. In cases like this, Ranktracker’s backlink monitor is an ideal tool. It can identify dead backlinks dating all the way back to 2019, and set up custom alerts to help you clear any that may have been marked as spam by Google.

Competitor research

Understanding the competition is a critical part of any SEO strategy. That said, SEO was more of a dark art in years gone by. You may have been able to see that your site was being overtaken by your competitors, but understanding why was an inherently complicated process, often based on an unstable foundation of guesswork.

Thankfully, there’s now a whole host of automated tools available that can help you track your competitors’ organic and paid results. These tools can give you unprecedented insight into what your competitors are doing, their biggest strengths, and their greatest weaknesses.

Once you’ve studied their strategy, you can apply this knowledge to your own website and make adjustments where necessary. Use a SERP checker to figure out who your immediate competition is, before auditing your site and optimizing it accordingly. Allow these changes to take effect, monitor your progress, rinse and repeat.

Report presentation

If you’ve just performed a sitewide web audit in-house, you’ll need a way of presenting this jumble of data to the rest of your team. Similarly, if you’re working for an agency, your next challenge is visualizing your findings to a client who may only possess surface-level knowledge of SEO.

Reports are a fantastic way to justify further investments from clients, or simply demonstrate the effect your SEO strategies have had on the business thus far. Through automation, reports can be generated within minutes, making it easy to identify your business's SEO wins, as well as any areas that may need to be improved.

(Ranktracker’s web audit tool in action)

Chatbots

Your content strategy, link building, and on-page optimization may aid you in attracting more organic visitors to your website, but it could take months (or even years) before you see a substantial increase in traffic or a jump in conversions. What if you could enhance your SEO in a more time-efficient way and see the results of your effort instantly?

Chatbots and SEO can work in harmony to accomplish this by:

• Improving your user experience — if your customers have a problem, they’re likely to want help _fast. _If you’re unable to invest in a 24/7 support team, a chatbot is your next best option. Keep your visitors happy and they’re likely to recommend you to friends or family, leading to an uptick in organic traffic.
• Increasing the amount of time a user spends on your site — picking through a website bit by bit can get incredibly frustrating. A chatbot can provide visitors with the answers they need instantly. This will reduce your site’s bounce rate and increase dwell time dramatically — a key tactic for SEO success.
• Optimizing your website’s ratings — by improving the overall user experience of your website, you’ll garner positive reviews on services like Trustpilot, Google Business, or Facebook. These ratings will positively influence your site’s ranking in the SERPs.

(The importance of dwell time for SEO. Image source: datadial.net)

Analyze log files

A wealth of useful information can be found hidden inside your log files. Extracting this information manually can be extremely daunting, especially if you’re inexperienced in the more technical aspects of SEO.

Automated SEO tools can help you to analyze your log files and see how google’s crawlers are interacting with both your and your competitor’s sites. Crawling issues caused by technical issues will be highlighted in a subsequent report.

If you’re keen to maximize the impact of your SEO strategy, analyze your log files regularly. This will ensure that Google can recognize your pages and rank them appropriately. As analyzing these files manually can be tedious, automating the process is a quick, easy, and preferred method, as it eliminates human error.

Conclusion

SEO is about maximizing the reach your business has, and creating the optimal conditions for your audience to find your site. This is why it’s so important to streamline your efforts and focus on what really matters: your core optimisation strategy. There’s no sense in spending hours on manual tasks which an automated tool could fire through in under a minute. By ensuring your SEO strategy makes use of automation, you’ll save stacks of time (and spend less of it bogged down by repetitive chores).