Can SEO Be Automated?

Ranking well in search engine results is crucial to gaining traffic to boost online sales. However, SEO takes time and effort and the age-old saying “time is money” has never been more prominent, especially in today’s marketing. This has led many to ask, can SEO tasks be automated? 

Automation has been steadily integrated into marketing to make developers' and marketers' lives a bit easier. However, when delving into this topic it is important to have a clear understanding of SEO and how automation may affect it.  

While there are many tools that can help you with your SEO, the human touch cannot be eliminated. These tools can ease the workload, but they do not compensate for every task that should be done. The bottom line is that not all SEO can be automated as it requires a skilled expert to implement and adjust it constantly to meet the changing demands of this turbulent industry and ensure best practices are followed. 

SEO tasks can be complicated, which means not all of them can be automated - but some parts can be automated through SEO tools, which are extremely handy when completing SEO work. The key is to understand what parts of SEO can be automated and what can’t be automated. 

What is automated SEO? 

SEO automation is the process of taking repetitive or simple tasks and automating them. Its main purpose is to maintain website performance using AI (artificial intelligence). Its primary functions are to: 

• study keywords 

• analyse website traffic 

• create blog posts or forum posts 

• create publications in social media 

• create social bookmarks 

• submit listings to Directories   

The manual process of completing these tasks can take weeks. However, there are specialist tools that can help to complete these tasks faster. SEMrush is one of the best SEO automation tools and is a firm favourite with all of us here at SilverDisc.  

AI can certainly help improve your SEO and saves you time, allowing you to focus on other important tasks. To find out more about the role AI plays in SEO, our handy blog post What is the role of AI in SEO will help you gain a better understanding. 

What elements of SEO can you automate? 

While it would be beneficial to have one tool that fits all regarding SEO, unfortunately, that is simply not the case. To get the most out of SEO automation, you must be strategic about which tasks you automate. 

Automation doesn’t simply replace hands-on analysis; it helps to streamline your efforts. You can’t simply set automation and forget about it and hope your website magically improves. It requires time and effort to best optimise your website now and in the future. 

There are, however, some elements of SEO that you can automate, which are:   

• Backlink analysis - Backlink analysis allows you to see which other websites are linking to your site. Link building plays a huge role in SEO. Links from reputable sources will increase your domain authority, so it is important that your backlinks are good quality ones. Spammy websites can cause a penalty and cause your website to rank lower. 

• Website rank tracking - Rank tracking tools allow you to see how each page on your website is ranking and how they improve over time. Page ranking factors need to be addressed as this method helps pinpoint which pages are performing better than others. Improving page ranking is vital as these changes can help improve your page to ensure it ranks as high as possible. 

• Website monitoring - Website monitoring allows you to highlight all of your pages without having to manually check and test all the time. Providing the best search results for users is key and website monitoring allows you to pinpoint errors such as broken links or poor scoring pages that will not feature in search results.  

• Competitor monitoring - Competitor monitoring allows you to see how you rank for your keywords compared to competitors. Competitor position mapping is a key task to perform. It highlights which keywords are shared, missing and unique, allowing you to highlight keywords you’re outranking your competitors on and those that are missing that you may want to optimise for. 

What SEO automation tools cannot do 

SEO can be overwhelming at times, which is why it is a relief to know that automation tools can assist you in completing your day-to-day tasks. However, if some aspects of your website are neglected, then it is not possible to achieve a good SEO score. To improve your ranking, some tasks cannot be automated and require experts to complete them. Some tasks include:   

• Content creation - Creating content that converts visitors into customers is vital to any business. Content creation should be unique and not plagiarized. Audience-engaging content is required for a good SEO score and cannot be automated. There are some tools that can serve as a guide, but human-written content is always the best practice in SEO. 

• Backlinks and link building - For a website to be referred by others it must have generated proof of its credibility. This can be done by creating good quality content that is relevant to the user. It is important to remember that authoritative links cannot be automated and have to be earned through their credibility. 

• Future optimisation - Certain aspects of optimising your website cannot be automated. It always requires a human to make informed decisions as to how the website needs to perform, not only in the present day but also looking ahead to the future. 

The pros and cons of SEO automation 

As with any automation that you can implement, there are pros and cons to automating SEO. 

Here are a few of the pros: 

• Time-saving - Unless you have unlimited resources, SEO tasks can mount up, which forces you to use certain tools that can aid your SEO efforts. SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz can greatly help with SEO tasks such as Keyword research, backlinks, and competitor analysis. This will help you perform the necessary tasks to boost your website ranking. 

• Helps capture relevant data - SEO automation helps to reveal data that would be difficult to collect manually. Tools can help locate keywords, backlinks and competitor data with ease, rather than spending hours trying to find the relevant information manually. Tools can give you insights into user behaviour, reach and awareness that your brand is making within your industry. 

• Allows you to scale - If your business needs to scale quickly, automation provides you with access to local SEO and keywords that are relevant to your business. It aids in geotagging and enables you to update directories since everything is centralised. 

Here are a few cons of SEO automation: 

• Low quality backlinks - A poor web page or website score can sometimes be attributed to poor quality links. Bad links can harm your website and cause it to be downgraded by search engine algorithms. Automating backlinks is seen as bad practice in SEO and implementing automation will hurt your authority score rather than help it.  

• Authentic quality content - Automatic SEO can help you get more done, but if not used correctly it can harm your website. Automating content such as web page content and meta descriptions is bad practice as it is likely not unique or relevant and will cause your domain authority to plummet.  

• Not everything can be automated - It is easy to cut corners and automate most sections of your website, but it is important to distinguish which activities are best done automatically and which ones will need to be done manually. Automation should be looked at as a useful tool to help you complete tasks that would previously have been done manually. 

To summarise, automation should make your life easier, but shouldn’t be central to every SEO task available. A mix of automation and manual SEO practices is the best solution for successful SEO campaigns that improve rankings in the long run. Automation tools are at your disposal to save time and energy on repetitive tasks, data gathering and auditing. Combine the two effectively and you will be well on your way to creating quality SEO campaigns.  

Following these hints and tips will help you avoid making the same mistakes made by businesses around the world and will drastically improve your SEO. If you would like help with your SEO or automation, get in touch with SilverDisc.