Fortunately, there are certain aspects of SEO that can be fully automated. Automation may not boost your rankings immediately, but it will certainly make your job easier and help you make wiser decisions.
Here are a few SEO processes you should automate.
1. On-page audits
If you want to rank high, boost traffic, and maximize sales, you need to optimize your website. This is why you need to perform continuous SEO audits and ensure that no stone is left unturned.
Sure, you can audit your site manually. Keep in mind that it would take days and weeks for you to comb through each page on your website. Worse yet, no matter how careful you are, chances are you won’t be able to find every problem your site is facing.
This is where Screaming Frog steps in. This gorgeous SEO spider tests the page based on the crucial on-page ranking factors, such as broken internal links, redirects, your site’s responsiveness, meta tags, duplicate content, and so forth.
Keep in mind that these tools won’t solve the problem for you. They’ll only identify it. For example, if you find a broken link, you’ll need to redirect it manually. If your page doesn’t have a meta description, you’ll need to write one. If Screaming Frog identifies duplicate content, you’ll need either to edit or remove it manually.
2. Link prospecting
Link building remains a crucial off-site SEO tactic. However, if you think it’s all about writing a mediocre article and finding a blog to publish it, you’re wrong.
You’ll first need to analyze your website; which content will you promote?
Then, you need to look at your audiences; what type of content do they like? What language do they find appropriate? Which sites, blogs, influencers, or platforms do they trust?
You will also need to look at your competitors; what keywords and anchors do they use? What kind of content do they create? What sites link back to them?
The next step is logical – finding relevant sites to build high-quality backlinks. Use a basic Google search or Google’s advanced search operators to find prospects, for example:
- inurl:article-submission
- inurl:guest-blog
- inurl:contribute
- inurl:get-involved
- inurl:write-for-us
Logically, before connecting with them, analyze their rankings, traffic, and domain authority, as well as their industry relevance, engagement rates, and content quality. Finally, you’ll need to enter all prospects into a spreadsheet and seek their contact data.
Manual link prospecting will eat up lots of your time. To avoid that, you should use an automated link building tool. For example, Dibz has recently published a link building guide, where they explain how to use this tool to streamline link building efforts.
Namely, Dibz lets you formulate numerous advanced search operator queries and provides results for them without making you complete a captcha. It also includes the Spam Filter that lets you determine the criteria you want Dibz to use when analyzing a website. All sites that don’t meet your expectations will be filtered out.
Finally, the tool even retrieves the contact information for each website and lets you import the prospects to PitchBox.
3. Backlink monitoring
Your backlink portfolio is one of Google’s most important ranking factors. Sure, it’s not the number of backlinks that matter. Google focuses on the quality of each backlink. Therefore, to boost your rankings, you need to do detailed backlink analysis. The idea is to identify the high-authority sites that benefit you, as well as the poor-quality ones that are bringing your website down.
Unfortunately, analyzing your website manually is extremely challenging. This is where tools like Monitor Backlinks can help. Namely, they have the SEO Auto Discovery feature that automatically detects all backlinks pointing back to your website. The tool will keep crawling for new backlinks, lost links, or any other changes to your backlink portfolio. Most importantly, instead of wasting hours entering your data into spreadsheets, Monitor Backlinks will classify your backlink data, too. You can use numerous metrics, including the link status, Moz’s DA, PA, and Spam Score, Majestic Flow Metrics, etc. This will shave off a few hours from your backlink monitoring strategy, letting you spend more time on the creative aspects of link building.
4. Social sharing
We often observe SEO and social media marketing as two completely separate practices. However, social media and SEO are two sides of the same coin. Even though social signals are not direct ranking factors, they let you find relevant link building opportunities, increase the exposure of your content, drive massive traffic to your site, and earn lots of valuable mentions, shares, and links.
This is why you need to use these channels to deliver value to your audiences. You need to have a solid editorial calendar that ensures your content is shared consistently. Each post you publish needs to be fresh, relevant, and informative. In addition to your blog posts, you should also produce content published by other relevant sites in your niche.
To stay on top of your social media presence, you should invest in a social media management tool and automate your social sharing efforts. With tools like Hootsuite, you can save time with pre-approved content, automatically schedule your social media posts, and discover new content by tracking relevant hashtags and keywords. You can even monitor relevant keyword, brand, and hashtag mentions and listen to what your audiences say about you.
Another amazing tool is IFTTT. This is a fully automated tool that connects 166 online channels. With it, you can directly send your Instagram photos to a Facebook album, tweet Instagram photos as native photos on Twitter, share positive user experiences across multiple social platforms, or archive your photos and social posts to Google Drive or Dropbox. Most importantly, you can connect your blog with your social accounts and promote your content across multiple channels as soon as it’s live.
Over to you
Even if you’re rocking SEO, handling its different aspects manually might be a daunting task. By automating complex SEO processes, you’ll have more time to focus on creative aspects of your digital strategy.
Still, SEO automation probably doesn’t work in the way you imagine. There’s no tool that can solve all your problems for you. Most of these tools will simply streamline some repetitive tasks for you or inform you about the problems related to your website. Just having this information in front of you is not enough; you will still need to analyze it and invest your time in improving your SEO presence.
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