4 Best SEO Automation Tools for 2023

Nothing replaces the need for good SEO to increase quality, targeted traffic to your website that converts to leads and sales. Yet it also takes a massive amount of time and resources to manage your SEO, analyze, report, test, and make small changes, only to start the process over again. 

While the good news is that there are automated SEO tools that can help, don’t get too excited. It takes more than just a few keystrokes to execute your campaign. You also need a human touch to guide the process and gather the insights to shape project decisions. 

Here’s a look at the best automated SEO software and how it can help your business.

What is SEO Automation? 

SEO automation is the use of technology or tools to automate specific SEO tasks and processes in order to gain efficiencies or produce data insights that would otherwise be too time-consuming or complicated to do manually.

SEO services are competitive and nuanced, requiring time and resources to scale. The best SEO automation tools can also leverage AI and machine learning to discover data-driven suggestions or recommendations. The results? Your team could save a massive amount of time by getting automated insights that typically scale to large or complex projects. All that being said, though, it’s not a good idea to set up a few tools and call it a day with your SEO. 

Can SEO Be Fully Automated?

Short answer: no. Long answer: no, but it’s understandable why you’d try. It’s nice to imagine that a few clicks of a button could optimize an entire website, but it’s just not possible. Although it’s certainly true that some tools help streamline the process and move things along, you’ll always need a guiding hand if you want to scale for real results. Shortcuts with SEO are usually about optimizing for loopholes, so you end up paying the price by witnessing ranking drops as Google and search engines develop more sophisticated search algorithms.

There’s also no single SEO tool that provides all the data and insights needed to execute a well-thought-out plan. Your team still needs a combination of tools to gather comprehensive insights about your website, from bounce rate to conversion rates to improving Core Web Vitals.

How to Choose an SEO Automation Tool

Automating some of your SEO processes is possible with a human touch to guide it, but the more significant issue is which tools to choose as part of that automating process. 

Various factors will influence your decision, including the project’s specific needs, deliverables, priority, and deadline. Most of the best SEO automation tools are highly specialized too, making it essential to have the correct use case and to know what exactly you want out of your tool. Beyond the specifics of your needs, two of the most important things to consider when weighing tools is its price and what integrations the tool offers. 

Price

Pricing is among the most significant factors in choosing the right automated SEO tools. They may save you time and quickly gather insights. However, they’re often so expensive that it’s important to select tools that fit your budget while still providing all the features you want and skipping overcomplicated add-ons. When automated tools are too complex, they require a higher level of expertise, so make sure your team is comfortable using them.  

Integrations 

Keep in mind that SEO automation resources often pull data from other sources, such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console. The tools you use should seamlessly integrate and work with other platforms and workflows you’re already using. The goal is to easily share data and insights to help make informed decisions about your project. 

Ultimately, you should choose automation tools based on how they achieve the purposes of the project while remaining cost-effective. They should be easy to use, provide the data you actually need, and make actionable, more efficient decisions than manually completing those same tasks on your own. 

Using SEO Automation Tools

Although automation tools can be very useful, they should not replace human expertise and experience. Instead, automation tools should be used in conjunction with manual analysis and expert interpretation to identify areas of improvement, track progress, and make strategic decisions.

Depending on the complexity of the task, SEO automation software can vary. The best SEO automation tools can help you save time and resources by automating repetitive or complex tasks such as keyword research, analysis, or reporting, which can take a significant amount of time and effort when done manually. These tools may also provide more accurate and reliable data than manual methods, which can help businesses make more informed decisions and improve their overall SEO efforts.

At Silverback, our regular workflows use automation in several ways:

• Using a tool to crawl a website and detect technical issues and errors. Tools like this can assign overall health scores and prioritize the most critical tasks that impact the most significantly.
• Tools that help prioritize the most significant opportunities for internal linking optimization. 
• Grouping similar sets of keywords to keep strategy and insights more organized.
• Providing suggested lists of in-depth topics to support a broader topic.

Best SEO Automation Tools and Software

If you’re not sure where to start your automation journey, here are some tools that can help save time and money while fueling your SEO success. 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a popular tool for keyword research, backlink analysis, and content analysis. Some of its features include Keyword Explorer, Site Explorer, Content Explorer, and others. You can easily track your website’s rankings, monitor your competition, and identify new link-building opportunities.

SEMRush

SEMRush is an SEO automation software providing keyword research, backlink, and content analysis. Its features hold their own against Ahrefs but with additional tools, including site audit, position tracking, backlink analytics, and many more. Whether you need to write better SEO headlines or assess your competition’s ranking, SEMRush offers tools to gather the insights you need.

Moz

Moz is among the best automated SEO software that improves online visibility with keyword research, link building, and website analysis. It also includes features such as Keyword Explorer, Link Explorer, and Site Explorer that could help with tasks like updating and optimizing old content for SEO.

SiteSeer (formally Zyppy)

SiteSeer‘s strengths lie in internal linking, an underrated yet impactful part of a successful SEO and digital marketing strategy. Google values internal links that point to other relevant and valuable content or expands an in-depth topic with optimized anchor text. It can be cumbersome to comb through pages and create internal links manually. SiteSeer analyzes data from the Google Search Console and recommends where to build internal links.

Despite how many items it saves, you still need to humanize the automation process. SiteSeer’s generated recommendations are definitely not ready to implement right out of the box. While some do a great job at highlighting current gaps in internal linking opportunities, many of the anchor text suggestions are not relevant or do not meet an acceptable level of human readability. A thorough vetting process is still needed to ensure the direction makes sense from an actual user’s perspective.

Other Tools

Beyond using some of the best SEO automation software available, we also have proprietary tools to help automate data hygiene and organization tasks, reporting, analysis, and more. Our team uses ScreamingFrog, a go-to tool for its variety of features and capabilities that can help provide insight into every aspect of SEO. With an eye on AI, we’re also exploring ChatGPT and other recently released AIs platforms to extract even more data and insights. 

Keeping the Human Touch

Despite all the buzz around AI and how advanced automated SEO tools are becoming, it still needs an SEO’s guidance. It’s essential to use the insights and data provided by automation tools to guide the creative process and make informed decisions rather than relying solely on automation. After all, SEO is an innovative and truly unique process that requires human-led strategy and execution.

At the same time, it’s vital to ensure your SEO automation tools don’t compromise the quality or effectiveness of your SEO efforts. So how do you balance the benefits of automation with the need to maintain a human touch in your work?

The answer lies in your ability to collaborate. 

We use the tools in conjunction with manual analysis and expert interpretation. Automation tools can provide valuable data and insights, but it’s essential to use manual methods and specialist interpretation to validate and interpret the results. This practice can help to ensure that the data is accurate and the insights are actionable.

Using multiple tools can also provide a more comprehensive view of the SEO landscape and help validate the data and insights each device offers. However, automated tools truly shine when handling repetitive tasks such as tracking, monitoring, and creating SEO reports, allowing more time to focus on creating, analyzing, and implementing strategies.

Do You Need SEO Management Services?

Automated SEO tools are clearly a hot topic within the marketing industry, and we constantly look for updates regarding AI, machine learning, ChatGPT, and new technology. There are clear benefits to using the technology as it continues to evolve, but it will always require a skilled, knowledgeable person behind the technology to know which levers to pull to support the overall organic strategy. 

Ready to see how SEO can impact your business? Explore Silverback Strategies’ SEO Management Services.