A growing brand needs a flexible, scalable strategy for its digital presence, and search engine optimization remains a key piece of that digital puzzle. Putting yourself on the map and remaining relevant despite the rising competition takes serious planning and creativity, which is why expert marketers spend most of their time refining their battle plan for SEO. With that in mind, marketers also need to take various processes off their busy hands: to be more productive, and to pour their precious time into other, more time-sensitive tasks.
Automation in SEO is one of the smartest ways to optimize your workflow and overall operations. However, some processes are more responsive to automation, while others demand your undivided attention. No matter how many innovative tools we have at our disposal, some tasks are best left in the hands of your skilled SEO experts. To choose the best segments of SEO for automation, here are a few you can add to your strategy and the tools you can use to streamline your processes for your marketing team.
Keyword opportunity research
When you have a brand-new business, most of your keyword research will still involve a fair amount of manual labor. Although you’ll use tools that search for you, such as SEMrush or Google AdWords, you’ll still need to be the one to look into the relevance of keywords and find a way to implement them effectively. However, if you’ve been around for a while, you can actually start refining your keyword research by looking at your competitors.
With certain keyword research tools, you can use a feature that specifically targets keyword opportunities still unused on your site, but that already exists on your competitors’ websites. Their ranking and level of traffic will help you determine if you can and should pursue them and sprinkle them into your latest content pieces, too.
Complex reporting and analyzing
Marketers love statistics and pie charts, all for the sake of refining their strategies and getting those thumbs up from their customers. Alas, getting those numbers right is often a demanding job, and when done manually, it’s often riddled with errors. Instead, using comprehensive SEO reporting tools has become the go-to solution for marketers in need of smarter, on-point, reliable data reports, sans the stress and hassle.
By engaging various integrations and allowing your reporting tool to access all of your web performance information, you allow the software to generate reports based on insights that are supported by pure, unbiased data. Although highly automated, the software meant for reporting is also highly customizable, allowing brands to utilize their various features and tweak them to their exact liking. So, you can finally say goodbye to endless spreadsheet manual filling-out and replace them with automated reports.
Monitoring backlinks
Among many other SEO-vital factors, your backlinks can be a burden to monitor and manage. Especially for a business that has been around for long enough to have numerous pages of content that might have been there for years. So many of those content pieces may exist all around the web, as guest posts, or as links shared by various relevant sites. Now, since backlinks are considered one of the most relevant ranking factors in the eyes of search engines, you need to make sure that all of your backlinks are of top quality, truly relevant, and up and running.
Now, merely letting your backlinks be won’t help you improve your ranking or ensure your digital reputation. So, using a backlink monitoring tool can be vital in ascertaining the quality of your backlinks, their overall presence, and you can then choose when and how to resolve backlink problems to always protect the links that are of the greatest importance to you.
Social sharing made simple
Content creation is one of those aspects of your marketing strategy that cannot be handled by machines – at least not yet, or at least not that effectively. You still need to put all those carefully-researched keywords to work through every piece of content you produce, get your designers to craft stellar visual content, and engage with customers regularly to ensure a better digital presence. All of that aside, content dissemination is easier when you automate it!
No matter how brilliant your latest article may be, you still need to get it in front of as many people as possible, and in addition to guest posting and your website, social networks are perfect for just that. In order to avoid cramming your social media managers’ entire schedule with link-sharing tasks, you can actually use a social sharing tool that automates social posting. Now, your marketers can focus on engagement and creativity instead of the menial work of social sharing, and you’ll never have to worry about forgetting to post something – the software will do it for you automatically.
Now that you have an overview of certain SEO segments that are easy to automate, take a closer look at your existing strategy and try to find room for improvement. After all, automation is all about boosting your business performance on a bigger scale, and allowing you to retain and grow your online presence without overburdening your employees or your budget. These seamless solutions will let you scale your digital presence efficiently and you can rest assured that their implementation will prove to be beneficial for your ranking down the line.