SEO Automation: Ways to Make SEO Tasks More Efficient

If you leverage SEO tools for rank tracking and keyword research, you’ve automated your SEO, right?

Well, not so much.

The sites that win in the search results for the query “seo automation tools” are far off from the automation that enterprise SEOs need to succeed in the world of search today.

Don’t blame Google's algorithms: The search engine is delivering upon searchers’ expectations of what they believe automation to be. But this classification barely touches the surfaces of true AI and automation in SEO and dilutes its meaning.

It’s time to re-evaluate how we think about automation in SEO.

What Is SEO Automation?

SEO automation is the process of handing over certain tasks to AI so you can prioritize your time and generate results faster.

Automation consists of advanced processes that help you make sense of the heaps of data that sit before you so you can reduce the time to action and move from data, to insights, to execution faster than before.

But, there's a misalignment about what exists for SEO in automation and where the industry must move to in SEO automation.

And, yes, the results in Google aren't wrong for "seo automation tools". Automation did start with rank tracking tools to automate ranking data and give SEOs big data without manually monitor the SERPs and position changes.

More on this down below, when we discuss the three main types of automation.

“Automation” is a classification that needs to advance from early 2000s to more than two decades later.

True SEO automation revolutionizes the way you approach organic search optimizations.

Much of the seoClarity platform is built around data, AI, machine learning, and automation, and this creates a fundamental shift in how SEOs spend their time.

Take a look:

Why Is Automation Important?

Automation is a necessity if you want to be able to handle the large datasets of your enterprise site.

Google moves so fast, that by the time you go to implement a fix or update, the data can already tell a different story.

There’s simply too much data to make sense of it on your own.

In fact, I heard from 20 enterprise experts that scalability is one of their biggest challenges.

It’s time that automation joins the scalability conversation. Automation is a surefire way to ensure scalability, since you offset SEO tasks to technology so you can prioritize your time where it counts.

Recommended Reading: How seoClarity Automates Your SEO

Despite its ability to revolutionize how you approach SEO, many don’t realize the true capabilities of SEO automation, or the vast problems it solves. Actually, some may not even realize that using automation for SEO execution at scale even exists!

Three Types of SEO Automation

There are really three ways to look at automation:

Data collection and aggregation
Insights and analysis
Execution at scale

Data Collection

The first type of SEO automation is data collection and aggregation. There's no need to manually collect data like rankings, crawls, and more when technology can do this for you.

This is the most basic form of SEO automation (but this is how the majority of digital marketing teams are automating their processes and what most SEO automation tools offer).

Insights and Analysis

Data to insight in automation acts as a filtering mechanism. At the top of the filter is the data. There is just so much data that it’s nearly impossible to make sense of it and tell a story.

Yes, there are SEO Excel jockeys out there that do this really well, but it's taking up a lot of their time when technology can help.

This is where the next level of automation comes in.

The funnel is the automation (the technology working its magic behind the scenes) with advanced NLP and ML models to surface insights from the data. Working consistently to priorities optimizations.

A byproduct of automated insights is the automation of task management. Setting up recurring crawls is an example.

When you do this, you skip the need to constantly set the crawl parameters, but still receive fresh insights into site health. Give the project your attention when it's time to do so.

The same is true of automation that monitors URLs, ranking shifts, and harmful backlinks and more to alert you to changes of your critical pages so you can catch the ones that might damage your search visibility.

Execution at Scale

Once you've automated your data collection and insights, you'll be ready to leverage the most sophisticated automation available: automated execution and implementation at scale.

This type of automation lets you implement site changes in real-time, execute SEO testing, update or add internal links all without the need for developers or to bypass limitations within content management system.

This isn't a system that just makes changes without your oversight. Think of it as a workflow - If this, then implement that. Or, even collect the changes and apply to all specified URLs within a single click.

Intrigued? Get more details down below.

10 Ways to Make SEO More Efficient with Automation

Powerful SEO technology allows you to integrate automation into multiple areas of your organic search processes. More importantly, it allows you to solve real time-constraint problems most SEO teams are plagued with.

1. Generate and Locate Insights

Enterprise SEOs have access to so much data that you probably don’t even know where to start.

The insights that will lead to rank improvements, a better user experience, traffic, and conversions are in there somewhere, but how do you isolate them?

This is something we’ve seen far too commonly with our enterprise clients. It’s also why we built Actionable Insights — your SEO Analyst that works 24/7, but beyond human capabilities.

It automatically monitors and analyses your site data to reveal more than 120 validated and verified insights that you can act on now.

2. Monitor Critical Page Changes

Many people and teams touch your website — developers, UX teams, digital marketing teams, and of course, your team — which can lead to fatal errors that damage your rankings.

For a site with thousands or millions of pages, it’s impossible to know what exactly changed on your site!

You can use the power of automation in Content Guard to be alerted when specific site elements change, so you’ll no longer be in the dark about what changed, when it changed, and what it was like before the change.

3. Confirm that Google Picked Up on Site Changes

When you make a dynamic update to your content site-wide, it’s important to verify that the change (whatever it may be) was noticed by Google.

Otherwise, you may cross a task off your to-do list when Google in fact has no idea of the change that was made, and doesn’t present it to users.

Manually browsing each page to ensure the changes took effect is no viable solution, so again we turn to automation — this time, SEO alerts.

4. Create Authoritative Content on a Topic

We all know that content has to be authoritative to rank, among other things.

But understanding a subject matter well enough to create quality content that performs within the search engines and tracks your target audience, all at scale, with natural human limitations … that's a big content marketing challenge.

This is why content marketers turn to content optimization and analysis tools to create content faster than ever before.

Our AI-driven content analysis tool Content Fusion automatically analyzes the top ranking content to understand and present to you how to create the most authoritative content.

With a few clicks, you’ll uncover the topic areas you need to include in your content, the context behind those topics, and ideal content lengths and metadata, effectively cutting your research time down to a few minutes instead of hours.

Plus, internal link recommendations make it easy to strengthen your topic clusters while offering a relevant path to your end users.

To overcome writer's block and speed up the writing process, Content Fusion even generates detailed outlines, drafts paragraphs, and facilitates content rewrites thanks to Sia, our ChatGPT-powered SEO assistant.

Unlike other content generation solutions powered by AI, the outputs that Content Fusion produces are always optimized for SEO and tailored to your unique data, competitive situation, and content specifications. Plus, you don't have to worry about leaking confidential information as your Content Fusion inputs never leave our servers.

Learn more about our commitment to secure and ethical generative AI innovations in our AI Manifesto.

5. Automated Content Briefs

The SEO content creation process is dense. So much goes into planning a strong content asset. From keyword research, to gathering questions to answer, and crafting the perfect meta description.

Not to mention, handing over this key information to your content writers and expecting them to follow through on your expectations.

With Content Fusion’s ability to auto generate content briefs, you automate your research and planning process ten fold.

All you have to do is enter your target keyword, and let the technology do the rest for you.

6. Monitor the Competition

It’s challenging enough to monitor your own site changes and rank positions, then you have to factor in the competition.

Your competitors can offer you invaluable insights for your own SEO strategy, so this is not something to let slip by the wayside.

Competitor alert changes in seoClarity tell you when competitor site elements change, or the competitor begins to outrank you in the SERPs.

7. Performance Reports

Crafting reports and sending them to the appropriate team members or stakeholders takes time, but it’s an absolute requirement.

You need to constantly prove out that the organic search channel is yielding results.

Automated dashboard reports that are automatically sent through email help you manage this task, so you no longer need to compile, organize, and send reports from scratch.

8. Ongoing Technical Site Health Insights

Maintaining a positive site experience for your end user is a core component of successful SEO.

Your site needs to be built on a strong foundation with fast page loading, easy navigation, proper and helpful internal links, and plenty more to offer a positive user experience.

Automation lends itself to a strong site health by detecting and assigning issue a priority level so you know which technical SEO issues to resolve first.

In addition, skip the redundant setup process with ad-hoc crawls to gain this data and move to recurring crawls that constantly bring back the freshest look at your site health.

These crawls return invaluable insights so you can continuously optimize for the end user experience.

Find issues like broken links and duplicate content, validate pagination, crawl JavaScript, and even capture Hreflang. With seoClarity, there aren't limitations placed on your site crawls or crawl projects.

9. Speak the Language of Your Customers

Searchers today will type anything and everything into Google search because they know they’ll get results back.

With so many ways to search (paired with human limitations) it’s impossible to understand all the ways your users search.

Topic Explorer’s Intelligent Match finds hidden connections between topics so you can align your content with the way your audience searches.

Maybe your users search for “indestructible chew toys” — or maybe they search for “chew resistant dogs toys,” “unbreakable dog toy,” or “unchewable dog toy.”

Intelligent Match uncovers and connects all of these queries so you can create the most authoritative content for your topic cluster.

It’s not enough to understand what users search for, you need to know the intent behind the search, too (and create your content accordingly).

Content has to be relevant in order to be of value to searchers.

You can of course scour the SERPs to get a clue of a query’s underlying intent, and compare it against other queries as well, but working keyword-to-keyword is a thing of the past.

After you’ve applied Intelligent Match to uncover the ways your audience searches, use our Audience Similarity metric to find the level of similarity between the topics’ underlying intent.

This way, you’ll know which topics to cover with a single piece of content, and which deserve their own page.

These are insights that would be impossible for a human to do manually.

10. Make Real-Time Changes to Your Site

SEOs often know what problems exist and what needs to be changed (if you don’t, automation is always there to pull insights!).

Then comes the real challenge for enterprises: Actually making the changes in a timely fashion that gets prioritized.

We all know the hardest part of enterprise SEO is getting things done.

Internal IT challenges, infrastructure issues, and a lack of resources all make it difficult to implement SEO changes — even though you know it will have a positive effect.

Instead of manually adding and modifying site elements like title tags, meta descriptions, internal links, canonical tags, structured data (and plenty more) on a page-by-page cadence, you can now use automation to immediately update these components all directly from seoClarity with ClarityAutomate.

Since you're operating outside of your content management system, you're able to update elements on your site even if your CMS has limitations.

A simple edit or addition that you make with the technology creates real-time changes on your live site.

No more chasing down content writers, developers, and production teams for weeks on end to fulfill a project that will now take minutes.

The release of Sia in June 2023 now allows SEOs to execute even more tedious and time-consuming tasks in bulk at the touch of a button.

Simply select a preset task such as generating page titles and meta descriptions, dynamically segmenting keywords, and translating keywords. Then set the parameters and click "Try" to review the results before selecting "Execute" to carry out the task at scale. It's that easy.

Conclusion

Automation makes you the “CEO of your SEO.”

Think about it. You get the necessary data and insights to accelerate your SEO processes without getting your hands dirty. There are still human decisions to be made, but with automation you can make those faster and better.

It’s time that we start to think of SEO automation as something more than the minimum expectation.

Enterprise SEOs need technology capable of scale, efficiency, and accuracy, so they can prioritize their time and focus on what matters.

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