How to Automate Your SEO: A Beginner’s Guide

There is no question, effective SEO can be a gigantic task.

With content marketers flooding the internet with weekly and even daily content it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand out from the crowd.

What’s more, if you regularly publish content your site will rapidly gain in size, making SEO optimization an unwieldy task.

And…

If you imagine an enterprise site with literally thousands of pages, it isn’t difficult to see why SEO automation is a necessary part of your SEO strategy.

With that in mind, in this beginner’s guide to SEO automation I’ll be getting into:

• What SEO automation is
• How you can easily get started with SEO automation
• Some basic tasks you can quickly automate to speed up your SEO process

What is Automated SEO? 

SEO automation is the process of using tools and programs to automate the many SEO tasks necessary to rank a site at the top of search engine results.

Tasks that you would otherwise do manually. This means SEO automation tools could save you time and money, two of a marketer’s most valuable assets.

Additionally, SEO professionals understand the need for automating tasks, as most of them are repetitive.

And…

When handled right, automating your SEO will allow you to operate your businesses on a much larger scale.

I mean, wouldn’t you **** to multiply yourself?

via GIPHY

Getting Started With SEO Automation 

In order to get started with SEO automation, the first step is to understand your SEO process. This means start with your goals and big picture strategy.

Once you understand that, it’s time to break down your process into a series of action steps. Having this clear will allow you to evaluate tasks. This will allow you to group them into:

• High-level tasks
• Mid-tier tasks
• Low-level tasks   

High-Level SEO Tasks 

A high-level task is one that can only be achieved by an experienced SEO. So, for instance, evaluating your data and coming up with an action plan would be considered a high-level task.

Another example would be problem-solving when things go wrong.

As you can imagine, you wouldn’t leave these tasks to automation.

Instead, you should automate lower-level tasks in order to free yourself up to focus on these high-level ones.

Mid Tier SEO Tasks 

A mid-tier task requires some skill, but they don’t require your best team members to implement them.

Examples of these tasks are things like writing title tags and meta descriptions.

Yes, you can automate these tasks, but since with automation things do go wrong, you should get one of your team members to edit the results.

Low-Level Tasks 

A low-level task, on the other hand, is one that requires little to no thinking.

Imagine all of those repetitive tasks that SEOs do on a daily basis. Think about all of that copy and pasting you do or checking on your rankings to make sure they aren’t tanking.

These are all good candidates for automation and as a beginner, they are the easiest place to get started.

Once you have broken your tasks into these three categories, you can now objectively see what can be automated and what can’t.

Simply speaking, you can automate the low-level and mid-tier tasks. This will free you up for high-level tasks.

The next step is to evaluate which tasks are gobbling up the most time. Consider these tasks your high-priority automation tasks.

What SEO Tasks Can You Automate? 

The truth is, you can automate many SEO tasks for your business, and there are various ways to do it.

When you are getting started the best place to start is to use ready-made software. If you need something customized, you can always configure them as per your business needs.

However, automating SEO can also be done with the helping hand of programming. You can easily use Python to write scripts that help you automate and customize SEO tasks by yourself.

Some of the SEO tasks you can automate include:

Now, since this is a beginner’s guide to automation, I’m going to focus on platforms for the rest of the article.

On the other hand, if you want to learn how to automate your SEO using tools like Python, check out my guide to Python for SEO.

Finding the Right Automated SEO Platform 

Many automated SEO tasks can best be achieved by using an SEO automation platform. This is a great way to get started with SEO automation which will leave all major SEO automation tasks in the hands of experts while you run your business as usual.

Investing in an automated SEO provider is a must, especially if you care to boost your site in all the right ways. These tools will help you track your site ranking, audit your site for technical problems, enhance your content and your audience targeting, and more.

Here are a few examples of what a top-notch SEO automation provider should offer as part of its service.

SEO Rank Tracking 

Manual keyword tracking is, to say the least, tedious. But, a professional SEO automation platform can tackle the task for you – and seamlessly too. Tracking your SEO rank is crucial as it gives you insight into your site’s progress.

SEO ranking remains a critical KPI that you should measure daily, even when using a long-term strategy. Keeping an eye on your rankings will help you diagnose when your site is losing rankings and will help you create strategies to bring in more traffic.

A rank tracking tool can automatically do the digging for you by providing you with the data you need.

This can easily be done by picking relevant keywords for all of your pages and entering them into your rank tracking tool.

Once you have this up and running, you can easily set up email notifications to let you know when there are any changes in your rankings.

So, for instance, you can set up the Rank Ranger email notifications to notify you when your URL has:

• Changed position
• Increased its ranking
• Decreased its ranking
• Reached a ranking goal

Once you have your rank tracking automation set up, your next step is to set up regular site audits.

Site Auditing 

Keeping up with technical issues is vital in SEO.

If Google can’t properly track and index your site, you’ll have trouble scoring the rank you were hoping for. Because spotting and reporting site problems manually is a burden, you’ll need to use a tool to automate the auditing process.

By automating a technical audit, you can easily identify site problems, especially those that might go unnoticed. Top-quality SEO automation platforms come prepared with their own Site Audit which you can put to excellent use for your site.

These tools can configure your SEO tracking, and gather plenty of information. Once you detect any potential issues, you can immediately move on to troubleshooting.

Once you’ve set up your site audits, it’s time to monitor your brand mentions.

Monitoring Your Brand 

When someone mentions your brand online, you want to know about it at once. Especially since people make buying decisions based on reviews.

Well, checking the search engines for links and mentions can be a pretty dull task to do manually. Luckily, a brand monitoring tool can help you automate this process.

These tools will help you find links and mentions quickly. What’s more, you can easily set up the software to send these mentions to your email.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Rank Ranger reputation management tool gives your site a Reputation Score out of 100. The score represents the general sentiment of the mentions.

Once you are tracking your mentions, you can use Rank Ranger to set up email notifications. These notifications can be set to send to your email address daily, weekly, or monthly.

Once you have this set up, you will get the mentions sent directly to your inbox. You will be able to see the title tag, URL, and the actual mention itself.

Backlink Audit 

To understand your backlink profile, monitoring new links when you acquire them isn’t enough. An equally important task automated SEO platforms can manage on your behalf is backlink tracking.

As we all know, content managers often delete pages. This becomes a potential danger to you the business owner as those pages might include links to your site.

What’s more, those links might provide big SEO value to your business, and losing them might cause your site to lose rankings.

You can manage this risk by setting up backlink tracking. To do this, you’ll have to upload your most valuable links into link management software.

For instance, our Link Manager tells you if any of your best links have been lost. This will allow you to notify the site owner and have them reinstated.