Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the oldest tricks in the digital marketing book, but it is an old trick that proves to be very effective even in today’s landscape. When you consider how many people use search engines to get to the information they are seeking faster, it is easy to see why SEO remains a must-use in any digital marketing campaign.
SEO, however, is a time-consuming thing to do. It is not something you can do once and forget; not if you want to maintain search engine exposure and stay on the first page of search results. Some of the tasks you need to handle include publishing valuable articles, reaching out to other sites, and gathering insights on keywords and competitors.
Many components of an SEO campaign, including doing on-site optimizations, rely heavily on manual work. Fortunately, you can now work towards automating certain SEO tasks – or parts of them – with the right tools. To help you get started, here are some SEO automation tips you can use right away.
Start with Keyword Research
Targeting the right keywords is the first step to SEO success. Today, you can generate better results by targeting long-tail keywords that match your business perfectly. Before you can begin optimizing your site for those keywords, however, you have a lot of research to do.
Research is the first element of SEO campaigns that can be automated. Tools like YourAmigo can help you find keywords to add to your site based on search volume and other parameters. Since the research can be automated, you can go through more keywords over a shorter period of time.
Tools like SE Ranking are also handy for doing research and analyzing keyword-based performance. The available tools let you set monitoring parameters and other details of the analysis. With SE Ranking in particular, you also get alerts when tasks are completed.
Focus on Smaller Tasks
A good way to approach SEO automation is by breaking down tasks into smaller chunks. It is much easier to automate smaller tasks than bigger ones. For example, it is easier to automate social sharing using a specific tool rather than automating the entire off-site SEO.
Breaking down tasks into smaller chunks lets you automate the repetitive ones too. When you want to automate internal linking, for instance, focusing on smaller tasks such as automating the selection of relevant cross-links is more achievable.
Using a simple script and a tool to help monitor internal linking, you no longer have to add cross-links to your pages manually. The tool will handle the selection of links to add and execute link distribution automatically, leaving you with tasks like adding new pages to the site.
Personalize!
Automating doesn’t mean leaving personalization – or your entire SEO strategy – behind. You can still add personal touches to your SEO campaign when parts of it are fully automated. The previous example of automating internal linking shows how far you can still personalize automated tasks.
Another good example is content optimization. Instead of displaying the same homepage to all visitors, you can boost user experience by creating personalized sections on the page. This will increase user engagement and the time they spend on your site.
Since UX-related metrics are now taken into account by search engines, improvements to the user experience will result in a boost in SEO performance. You just need to add dynamic sections and automate content delivery based on visitor insights.
Automate Monitoring
We really cannot talk about automation in SEO without talking about SEO monitoring. Monitoring and analysis are two tasks that can be automated immediately. More importantly, automation tools for these two tasks are widely available.
Instead of manually processing data exported from Google Analytics, you can use filters and custom dashboards to simplify the process. Even better, you now have tools like AnswerMiner to help with deeper, more comprehensive data analysis and insights gathering.
AnswerMiner takes data from various sources – including Google Analytics – and processes it further. Based on how you monitor SEO performance, you can create rules, set analysis cycles, and completely automate the processing of traffic and SEO data on the platform.
Utilize AI
Artificial intelligence elevates automation to a whole new level. If you think having the ability to deliver content based on users or their journey is impressive, wait until you start integrating AI into your SEO campaigns. AI can help automate vital tasks, including complex ones.
Pave AI is a tool that you definitely need to use if you want to gain more insights from your SEO activities. While it relies on data from Google Analytics, Pave AI is capable of doing in-depth data analysis and can generate custom reports that suit your SEO objectives perfectly.
Can I Rank leverages AI in the same way, but this time for measuring whether your site can rank for a particular keyword or set of keywords. It is a tool that simplifies the whole process of testing keywords to add to the site. It can even recommend how you can stay ahead of the competition.
Integrate
Last but certainly not least, don’t forget that SEO is an integrated and continuous process. While it is easier to automate smaller tasks and focus on specific parts of the campaign, you still have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture at some point.
Alli AI, one of the first artificial intelligence-based tools for SEO, understands the importance of integration. It offers tools for specific SEO tasks, but it integrates those tools and offers them as a platform for automating many parts of your SEO campaign.
Alli AI is unique in how it handles the A-to-Z of SEO. It gives you the ability to automate tasks such as optimizing your site for performance and scaling up your engagement with other site owners, but it keeps you true to the bigger objectives you have in mind.
Automation clearly makes SEO more manageable. While it is still a good idea to get experts working on parts of your SEO campaign, you now have the option to handle tasks such as keyword selection and performance monitoring with the help of automation.