Content is king, but search engine optimization is still incredibly important. Even if what you create is of the utmost quality, even if what you publish is incredibly engaging, that doesn’t matter if you can’t get eyes on it. But what if you don’t have the time to spend exploring the intricacies of on-page and off-page optimization?
What if you want to focus solely on building your website, and leave the repetitive parts of SEO to someone else?
The obvious answer would be to hire an agency. But there’s an alternative – automation. While truly automated optimization is likely still a few years off, there are already plenty of tools available on the web that allow you to optimize some of the most complicated and tedious SEO tasks, freeing you up to focus more on your brand.
SEO Audits
We’ll start with one of the most difficult tasks – figuring out what you need to optimize, and how your optimization efforts so far have turned out. Doing this manually can take hours, especially for a larger website. The good news is that most SEO tools now feature automatic site scans that identify and isolate problems and recommended areas of focus.
If you’re using WordPress, Yoast is probably your best bet here. Alternatively, you can tap into a free (or freemium) auditing tool like SEOptimer, Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer, or Woorank.
Research
What keywords should your site target? What influencers should you reach out to in order to gain traction for your brand on social? What topics are people interested in reading about?
These are all questions that need to be answered if your SEO efforts are going to succeed. But they’re also some of the most time-consuming aspects of website optimization. SEMRush is probably one of the best tools in this regard, including an API for keyword research automation built-in.
Monitoring
There are a lot of moving parts in SEO. Backlinks, keywords, social signals, site rankings, and more. Keeping track of all this stuff manually is an exercise in exhaustion and tedium, requiring you to juggle multiple dashboards and jump constantly between screens.
Most of this stuff can be automated, and fairly easily at that. As an added bonus, a lot of the tools that offer SEO monitoring also feature other automation functionality as well. We’ve already mentioned Yoast and SEMRush, but there’s also SE Ranking and SERPStat
Automation Is The Future
We’re still several years off from complete SEO automation. And even once we’ve automated the vast majority of tasks involved in optimization, there still needs to be some human input. Otherwise, at a certain point you’ve got to wonder if your website is even yours anymore.
