Who doesn’t want to show up on the first page of Google? After all, when the average person is looking for a solution to their problem, they will typically perform a search and click on the top results that appear on the first page.

Therefore, many businesses invest an extraordinary amount of time and money into reaching one of the top coveted positions on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for their desired keywords.

Earning yourself a prominent place in the SERPs requires lots of hard work. You need to plan your every step strategically, as well as constantly keep pace with the industry changes and monitor your site’s performance. And, no matter how knowledgeable and experienced you are, doing SEO manually may be overwhelming for you. Fortunately, there are many automated tools that will help you perform different SEO tasks more efficiently.

Key SEO Activities You Should Automate

The key to unlocking your SEO success is to know which SEO processes to automate and which tools to invest in. This is exactly what we’re going to discuss today.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the basis of your SEO strategy. After all, it all begins with a searcher typing a keyword phrase into Google’s search box. And, to put your site in front of them, you need to optimize it for the phrases they enter when performing their research. This was beautifully explained by Matt Cutts a while ago:

“You don’t want to just say ‘Mount Everest elevation.’ You want to say words like ‘how high is Mount Everest’ because people are going to type ‘how high is Mount Everest?’”

[Tweet “To get the most out of your keyword research, you need to automate it. These tools will help! “]

Of course, to get the most out of your keyword research, you need to automate the process. There are many tools that may help you. You could begin your search using Google Keyword Planner, but SEMrush will save you a lot of time and effort.

Namely, it lets you:

• identify your competitor’s most popular keywords,
• track position changes in domains, and
• find long-tail keywords for your site and your PPC campaigns.

By using its Keyword Magic and Keyword Analyzer, you will be able to conduct a keyword analysis faster than you would by combining several tools. While Keyword Analyzed classifies keywords based on their volume, difficulty, and click potential, the Keyword Magic Tool helps you choose long tail combinations with the exact keywords users are looking for.

SEO Reporting

The SEO landscape is extremely turbulent and massive changes can happen overnight without you even noticing them. Precisely because of that, everyone working in this industry needs to have reliable data to back up every step they take. This is something both your client and your boss expects to see.

This is where SEO reporting steps in. It gives you the opportunity to validate your actions, as well as show how valuable the techniques you use have been, what goals you’ve achieved using them, and what aspects of your strategy could be improved in the future.

However, collecting mountains of SEO data, copying them into spreadsheets, classifying them, and analyzing them manually is both frustrating and expensive. Not to mention that the reports you send out to your boss or client need to be easy-to-understand and pleasing to the eye. Obviously, creating such a report would eat up lots of your time and prevent you from focusing on some other aspects of your SEO strategy.

To prevent that from happening, you should automate SEO reporting, and one of the most powerful tools that may help you is Reportz. It allows you to manage all your SEO information from one, highly customized SEO dashboard. Each dashboard represents a gigantic blank space you can personalize according to your liking.

The tool integrates with all major SEO tools including Ahrefs, SEMrush, Rank Ranger, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. This means you can now combine the widgets from these tools and track only those KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that are relevant to your SEO campaign. It also lets you customize the reports using your logo, font, and colors, as well as send them automatically.

[Tweet “Collecting and recording SEO data manually in spreadsheets is too time-consuming. How can you automate it?”]

Backlink Analysis

Your backlink portfolio is one of the most significant SEO signals that determine how well you will rank. These links indicate how authoritative and trustworthy your site is.  Of course, to earn lots of high-quality links to your site, you need to focus on improving your site’s usability and creating killer content. This is how you will inspire people to link back to you organically.

However, the challenge is staying on top of your links. In other words, how to know which links boost your site’s authority and which ones bring it down?

One of the most popular tools among marketers is definitely Ahrefs. As it crawls about 6 billion web pages daily, it is a perfect option for conducting backlink research. You can automatically set it to monitor your Google rankings using their Rank Tracker tool, as well as get notified of all new keywords, new and lost backlinks, and recent brand mentions.

Another tool you could try out is Monitor Backlinks. This tool automatically detects all the links pointing to your site and constantly crawls for any change to your backlink profile.

[Tweet “Key SEO Activities You Should Automate (plus recommended tools)”]

On-Site Audits

The overall effectiveness of your SEO campaign depends on how optimized your site is. This is why you need to conduct continuous audits of your site and monitor a range of on-page factors. Now, looking for your site’s weaknesses manually is almost impossible. It would take you weeks to inspect your site carefully and find all potential problem areas. Worse yet, you wouldn’t probably be able to spot every element that should be fixed.

Tool Recommendation: This is where tools like Screaming Frog SEO shine. All you need to do is enter your URL and this web crawling tool will detect your broken links, test redirects, audit page titles and metadata, and look for duplicate content. Most importantly, it integrates with Google Analytics, generates XML sitemaps, and can be set up for scheduled crawls.

Tool Recommendation: Another great tool that may help you is SEOptimer. Similarly to Screaming Frog SEO, this tool is easy-to-use and provides you with loads of data, including your site’s usability, page load speed, social signals, and so forth.

Of course, on-site audit tools can help you detect your major on-site problems, but they cannot fix them for you. This is something you need to do on your own. For example, if you have broken links, you need to replace them with the ones that work. If the tool finds duplicate content, you’ll have to remove it manually.

Your Turn!

Unfortunately, there is still no comprehensive tool that may handle your entire SEO campaign for you. However, there are plenty of tools that can help you automate certain aspects of your SEO practices, be it keyword research or backlink analysis. They will give you more flexibility and help you do your job faster.

What tools do you use to automate your SEO processes?

Ciao,
Miss Kemya

This is a guest post by Raul Harman, Editor-in-Chief at Technivorz, a website dedicated to all things tech related, written to cater to people for whom a dose of technology is as important during the day as breakfast, lunch and dinner. Connect with Raul on Twitter.