Search Engine Optimization (SEO) automation is the process of automating simple or repetitive tasks. Performing these tasks can help companies rank higher on the search engine result pages or provide helpful tools needed for making SEO marketing tasks quicker and more efficient. SEO automation allows businesses to focus on more creative marketing aspects and save time and resources.
SEO automation requires automation tools or SEO software. These tools help companies in many ways. They can be used to build effective SEO strategies, appear higher on search engines, find various internal website errors and broken links, etc.
Companies can find various SEO automation tools on the market. We listed and reviewed the best tools to help you find the right SEO automation software to suit your business needs. But before we get into the tools, let’s see what SEO tasks can be automated.
What SEO Tasks Can Be Automated?
SEO automation tools offer a broad spectrum of functionalities. Here are the main tasks that these tools can automate:
Monitoring Site Rankings
The main goal of SEO is to get your site ranking in various searches as high as possible. To know how your site is doing, you need to monitor all your pages and see what keywords they rank for. However, constantly monitoring your site rankings becomes nearly impossible if you have hundreds of pages with many keywords.
This is where SEO automation steps in. You can automatically monitor your site rankings. SEO monitoring enables companies to see how each of their pages performs, track changes, and get suggestions on how to improve rankings.
SEO reports
Most SEO automation tools offer automated SEO reports, which can save a great load of time. Instead of collecting all information manually, SEO software will provide detailed reports whenever needed.
These reports can then be used to improve your SEO strategy or simply track your site’s performance on search engines.
Link prospecting
Backlinks are essential for good SEO performance. Having links on other sites leading to your website can raise your site’s authority and let search engines know that your content is valuable. Companies can utilize web scraping to help them with link prospecting.
Data gathering for SEO purposes is a great technique. It helps automatically find potential backlink opportunities on sites where your content would be relevant. It also allows automated backlink monitoring, so you’ll always know if your links get removed.
Keyword research
SEO automation tools can automate keyword research by suggesting relevant keywords. All you need to do is provide a list of your main target keywords, and the software will return a list of related keywords and their search volumes.
This can point toward great keyword ranking opportunities and significantly speed up your keyword research process.
Site’s Technical Health Monitoring
One of the features that may define your website’s success on search engines is your site’s technical health. This includes content loading speed, site uptime, broken links, etc. Search engines don’t want to feature pages with issues which can potentially intervene with user experience on the site.
That’s why it’s important to monitor your site’s technical health. SEO automation tools can run automated tests on your site to find issues and report them in real time so that you can take action as quickly as possible.
6 Best SEO Automation Tools
Here’s a list of the best SEO automation tools, their features and tasks that they can automate.
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best and most popular SEO automation tools on the market. It offers an all-in-one SEO toolset to cover various needs. So if you can only get one tool for your SEO automation, then Ahrefs is probably the best option since this tool can cover a range of various tasks.
This tool doesn’t offer a free trial, but it offers free limited access to two of its features - site audit and site explorer. This tool is widely used, so you’ll definitely find reviews online, which can help you decide whether this tool is right for your business case.
These are the main task automations and features that Ahrefs offers:
- Site audit helps analyze and optimize your website
- Competitor analysis enables analyzing competitors and their performance
- The keyword explorer feature finds the most relevant keywords
- Content explorer provides insights from your industry’s top-performing content
- Rank tracker tracks your site’s ranking progress
2. Semrush
Semrush features a heavy SEO database, which can provide valuable insights. Companies use this tool to gain a competitive advantage in the SEO field and also boost your content marketing, advertising, market research, and social media efforts. Various agencies also use this tool.
This automation tool has a free plan, which allows testing the software on a small scale. Paid plans cover many tools, including SEO, social, PPC, and others.
Semrush offers over 55 tools and reports, including:
- On-page SEO helps improve the SEO performance and your site’s health
- Keyword research offers relevant keywords that can increase your traffic
- Local SEO helps optimize content to bring more site visitors from your area
- Rank tracking allows monitoring keyword rankings in a target location
- The content optimization feature provides personalized content optimization suggestions
3. Google Search Console
Google is the largest search engine out there. Companies work hard to rank as high on its search results page as possible. With this in mind, it makes sense to turn to the same company for tips on how to rank higher on their site.
To start using Google Search Console, you need to submit your sitemap for indexing. You don’t have to do it if you’re already using Google Analytics.
Google Search Console is a free SEO monitoring tool. While it has fewer features than most other paid tools, it can provide valuable insights into your site’s SEO performance.
Here are the main features:
- Search analytics show which queries bring the most traffic to your website
- Issue alerts notify you if there are issues with your website
- The URL inspection tool shows you how Google sees your website
- You can manually submit your sitemaps and URLs for crawling
4. Mangools
Mangools offers five SEO automation tools to help with your tasks. It’s a straightforward tool with convenient features. Mangools can be used by SEO experts of all levels, from beginners to professionals.
You can get full access to all the Mangools tools for free with a 10-day trial. To get that, you’ll only need to create a user account.
The five SEO automation tools by Mangools and their functions:
- Keyword finder helps discover low-difficulty high-volume keywords
- SERP checker reveals SERP results for many different locations
- SERP watcher allows sharing interactive reports quickly and easily
- Link miner helps find backlinks with convenient filtering
- Site profiler enables companies to monitor their competitors
5. Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool is slightly different from the other tools we listed. It’s a website crawler. This tool can extract data and audit your site for common SEO issues and technical errors. Finding these issues can help with on-site SEO.
While this tool has fewer features than other tools we listed, Screaming Frog focuses on fixing issues that can affect your SEO and does that well.
You can use the tool for free to download and crawl up to 500 URLs. If you need to inspect more links, you can purchase a license and remove all limits.
Screaming Frog features:
- Analyzing metadata informs you whether your titles and meta descriptions are the right length
- The tool can help you find and fix broken links
- You can schedule audits to run whenever needed and deliver data in any format of your choice (i.e. Google Sheets)
- Discover duplicate URLs or other content on your site, such as titles, descriptions, etc.
6. SurferSEO
If you’re looking for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered tool to guide you through search engine optimization step by step, Surfer may be the best choice for you. This tool helps create an SEO strategy and stick to it. Surfer covers every step of the optimization process - research, writing, optimization, and audits.
This tool comes with a free version for those who just created a new website and want to optimize it for search engines from the start. Surfer also offers a free extension for instant keyword checks and an AI outline generator for writing optimized content.
The main Surfer automation features include:
- Content editor with content suggestions for search engine optimized texts
- Content planner to help you build an effective content strategy with SEO in mind
- The audit feature that helps you monitor your performance and stay on track
Conclusion
Automating SEO tasks is an effective way to save time and resources for any company. Businesses employ SEO automation tools to make their efforts more efficient and reach their goals quicker, as these tools can automatically find potential issues and spot new opportunities.
SEO automation tools cover various everyday tasks, starting with website monitoring for technical errors to providing helpful reports whenever needed. These tools can also help build and monitor backlinks, track keyword rankings, and find new opportunities for content. Doing many of these tasks manually would take a considerable amount of time. Even more, some opportunities could simply be missed due to human error.
You can find various SEO automation tools on the market, and most of them offer great features. However, before choosing a tool, you should know what your goals are and how these tools will help you reach them.
