Tracking and optimising SEO can be a time consuming challenge. Especially if you’re a business owner, precious time that could be spent on what really matters – your business – is dedicated to getting seen in search results – an often unwieldy and uncertain process.
Here’s where SEO automation comes in.
SEO automation tools make easy work of understanding complex SEO analytics, and automate processes that would otherwise take hours of work.
What can you automate with SEO tools?
The term ‘automation’ is perhaps a little misleading here. SEO optimisation cannot be entirely automated – a human perspective is very much needed.
What automation does is make the job much easier, much more intuitive, and gives an online marketer the tools to unleash their SEO creativity.
What types of SEO automation tools are there?
Broadly speaking, there are four different types of SEO automation tools.
SEO audit tools
These tools provide a full audit of your website’s SEO, covering keywords, social media, and SEO backlinks. They can show you what content is working, and what isn’t. They will also provide solutions to resolve these issues in a comprehensive SEO automation package.
SEO keyword search
These SEO automation tools can identify popular keywords and phrases and can be filtered to suit your specific niches and localities. They can also provide you with detailed reports about the keywords in your own campaigns, summarising how they are performing, with suggestions for how to improve.
SEO Influencer tools
Influencer marketing is a lucrative way to drive traffic to your business, but contacting and connecting with influencers can be a time consuming and laborious process. Influencer automation tools can help you to easily identify potential influencers for your brand, and make contacting them a breeze.
Read also: New and Innovative Influencer Marketing Programs to try
SEO social media automation
Whilst it’s often reported that social media has little impact on SEO, its impact is actually felt dramatically when seen in its wider context. Social media provides a continuous stream of content to keep your business in the minds of your customer base, which can eventually lead to repeated conversions and can draw the attention of high-profile influencers to power your brand.
Here are our top five SEO automation tools for beginners starting on their SEO journey…
SEMrush
SEMrush is the leading all-encompassing SEO auditing tool. SEMrush is packed with fantastic SEO automation features. Organic research reports highlight the best keywords for use in your campaigns, and show which keywords are bringing views to your competitors.
Backlink analytics allow you to analyse the sites linking back to your content, whilst traffic analytics can help you monitor and optimise traffic to your business’ website. You can analyse markets to understand your next niche. There’s even an SEO writing assistant to optimise content for keywords and improve readability.
SEMrush is one of the more expensive SEO automation tools, with tiered pricing starting at $99.95 per month for the ‘Pro’ plan, which focuses on start-ups and in-house marketers, going up to $399.95 for the ‘Business’ plan, which is aimed towards larger businesses with a wide online presence.
Read also: What Are Backlinks?
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
The SEO Spider automation tool is an industry-leading website crawler that audits websites for common SEO errors. The tool can find any broken links on your website, and make it easy to export these in bulk to be resolved, which can dramatically improve SEO.
You can edit page titles and meta descriptions in the application, and the interface shows how they will appear in search engines. The lite version is completely free, but restricts the crawl to 500 URLs. It can be upgraded to the paid version for £149.00 per year, which includes unlimited crawls and many other extra features, including spelling and grammar checks.
Awario
Influencer marketing has made a huge impact on the processes of social media marketing, and it can be a complex subject to get your head around. Awario takes the stress out of social listening.
This SEO automation tool monitors websites and social media for mentions of your chosen keywords, including your business name, to highlight them to you, so you can react before your competitors. It provides in-depth analysis of your presence on social media – quantifying the amount of positive and negative feedback in your mentions.
Furthermore, it provides you with extra tools for social selling by collating posts asking for recommendations related to products and services like yours, as well as negative comments made about competitors. Awario helps you to identify relevant influencers by the social network, and add filters to narrow down the ideal influencers for your campaign. Awario’s pricing plan has tiers at £29, £89, and £299, depending on the size of the campaign required.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an SEO automation tool that allows you to gain insight and utilise the strategies of your competitors. The tool provides you with reports of organic keyword phrases that are working well for your competitors, so you can adapt and develop on those topics for your campaign, saving many wasted hours of figuring out what content will get you Seen.
The free keyword tool provides countless suggestions, with details of the competition and seasonal trends. The tool also provides insight into which sites will provide valuable backlinks to your business.
Ubersuggest has three pricing tiers, starting at £29 per month for the ‘Individual’ tier, which covers 1-3 websites. For small and medium businesses, the ‘Business’ tier is £49 per month, whilst the ‘Enterprise’ tier is suited to larger businesses with over 8 websites, priced at £99 per month.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo provides insight into social media campaigns and other forms of content to help you to develop new content ideas that will get you more sales. As well as a keyword tool,
BuzzSumo displays which topics are becoming viral, and can filter down by region, so you can find the topics most relevant to your customer base and locality. Content samples are provided to give you inspiration for your next article or post. You can also search questions left on forums and websites across the internet to discover in-demand topics that have yet to be cornered by your competitors.
The extent of content research that can be made with BuzzSumo goes even further, as you can track trending topics within certain niches, and discover successful Facebook post formats to tailor your strategy on this platform. Other useful features include monitoring tools for social media mentions and backlinks, and an influencer marketing automation tool, which makes BuzzSumo one of the best all-encompassing social media automation tools.
BuzzSumo has four pricing tiers, with the cheapest at $99 per month, and the most expensive, which covers custom plans aimed at larger businesses, at $499+ per month.
Final summary
Another option for businesses struggling with SEO can be to seek guidance from an SEO agency, whose specialists use their expertise to create an effective strategy to increase your search engine rankings and boost organic traffic. Whatsmore, they often develop your strategy far past search engine optimisation. For example, this SEO agency Portsmouth incorporates PPC, social media and user experience to develop their clients’ campaigns.
There are a wide variety of different SEO automation tools, with each suiting different kinds of businesses. Choosing the right one for your business is a matter of considering your niche and business priorities – if you’re aiming to appeal to influencers specifically, and influencer automation tool will be best for you, but if it’s wider social media campaigns you’re focusing on, a social media automation tool will naturally be the most effective choice. A fully configurable server can be a smart buy for businesses aiming to improve SEO rankings, as they can be used for SEO hosting. Whatever you choose, SEO automation tools can take the boredom out of repetitive tasks and the mystery from creating engaging content.
Photos courtesy of gettyimages.com
