Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is an ever-changing activity that gives quite some headaches to bloggers and website owners around the world. If organic traffic is the main way your website relies on getting new users, you know very well that SEO is not a piece of cake. Every year, Google comes up with some algorithm adjustments that usually messes up with the previous year strategy.
For website owners, who cannot rely on an SEO agency, obtaining effective SEO results requires constant hard work. Putting an emphasis on this, however, doesn’t always result in immediate outcomes. For this reason, many decide to shift their attention to more controllable factors and let SEO be, hoping that somehow it will work.
Should You Still Focus On SEO in 2021
Considering the hard work and the little chances to succeed against bigger players, it might be reasonable to ask yourself, why. If you have little resources, should you still put an effort in trying to rank higher in Google or any other search engine?
Obviously, the answer is yes!
Organic traffic will outperform any paid campaigns on search engines by 5.66 times. On top of that, if you still think it might be wiser to invest money in paid ads rather than SEO, you need to consider that nearly 80% of online users ignore those sponsored ads in search results.
Remember that ranking on search engines requires a long time and hard work. It won’t happen overnight. The key to being successful in the SEO game is to dedicate each week some time to it. If you don’t see results at the beginning, and you won’t, don’t despair, just keep working on it.
How To Focus On SEO Without Losing Sight Of The Bigger Picture?
As a website owner or blogger, you might think that there is not enough time to do everything. You are alone or part of a small team and the tasks are too many. SEO won’t bring results tomorrow, so how can you successfully keep working on it while everything else happens?
SEO is not made of just one activity. There are several things you need to take into consideration when optimizing your website for SEO. Content creation, keywords optimization, off-page, and on-page optimization, long-tail keywords, influencer outreach, and link-building are just some of the things you need to consider when working on your SEO strategy.
Online resources can help you identify what makes the most sense for you to focus on, however, implementing those activities is the toughest part of the plan. SEO success is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into it.
The good news is that some of these activities can be automated to free up your time from some boring tasks.
What SEO Activities Can You Automate?
Automation won’t help you achieve better results faster, however, it will help you dedicate some of your time to other growth areas. Using automation tools is one of the best hacks that you can implement in your strategy to do more with fewer resources.
1. SEO Analysis
“Analysis paralysis” is a well-known issue not only in the SEO world. When we need to analyze too many things, we tend to overthink on what to do next, which leads to not taking any action at all. With SEO, you might find yourself analyzing tons of data and get stacked into “what’s next” decision, especially when SEO is not your area of expertise.
For this reason, automating SEO analysis can free up quite a lot of time from your daily activities. Easily understanding how to optimize your on-page SEO as well as off-page activities can be a life-saver.
Best Automation Tools For SEO Analysis
Yoast SEO Plugin
If your website is running on Wordpress, then this is a free plugin you don’t want to miss out on. It helps users easily identify SEO issues for on-page activities and ways to solve them. The free version has some limitations, obviously, but the value you get from it is quite high. The plugin also has a “Readability Analysis”, that checks on how easy it is to read the content.
SEOptimer
This tool helps website owners get also a good understanding of off-page factors that influence SEO rankings. All you need to do is simply type an URL and wait for the results. The data provided is not only limited to SEO but takes into consideration also usability, social signals, and performance.
Google Search Console
Perhaps the best way to know how a website is doing on Google is to ask Google itself. Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners take a look at how the website is doing. There are several interesting things that you can check with it. For example, “Fetch as Google” gives an idea of how Google sees specific URLs helping users in troubleshooting some issues; or “Page Speed Insights” allows to measure the performance of desktop and mobile versions of the website.
Woorank
This is another tool to help website owners and marketers get insights on webpages optimization and improvements. The analysis is divided into different sections and it takes into consideration important areas together with SEO, such as usability, mobile performance, technologies, and social signals.
HubSpot Website Grader
HubSpot is a well-known company for their marketing and CRM solution, however, back in 2007, it launched a website grader tool that helped understanding performance and optimization opportunities. Like many other tools for SEO analysis, it is very simple to use, simply add a website URL and wait a few seconds for tips.
Moz Seo Toolbar
Moz offers several paid SEO tools that help website owners understand how to improve their SEO strategy. There are, however, also free tools, such as the Moz SEO Toolbar. This is a simple add-on that quickly helps to analyze any website. Although it doesn’t give you any suggestion per se on what to do or how to fix it, the tool helps to easily identify where problems might be.
2. Influencer Research
As part of improving your SEO results, you will need to make sure to reach out to relevant influencers in your industry to share the content created. Making good use of influencers can increase your website social presence and shares across different platforms. However, reaching out to influencers can be a daunting task. Sending hundreds of emails hoping for an answer is not a scalable activity.
If your website is running on Wordpress, then this is a free plugin you don’t want to miss out on. It helps users easily identify SEO issues for on-page activities and ways to solve them. The free version has some limitations, obviously, but the value you get from it is quite high. The plugin also has a “Readability Analysis”, that checks on how easy it is to read the content.
SEOptimer
This tool helps website owners get also a good understanding of off-page factors that influence SEO rankings. All you need to do is simply type an URL and wait for the results. The data provided is not only limited to SEO but takes into consideration also usability, social signals, and performance.
Google Search Console
Perhaps the best way to know how a website is doing on Google is to ask Google itself. Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners take a look at how the website is doing. There are several interesting things that you can check with it. For example, “Fetch as Google” gives an idea of how Google sees specific URLs helping users in troubleshooting some issues; or “Page Speed Insights” allows to measure the performance of desktop and mobile versions of the website.
Woorank
This is another tool to help website owners and marketers get insights on webpages optimization and improvements. The analysis is divided into different sections and it takes into consideration important areas together with SEO, such as usability, mobile performance, technologies, and social signals.
HubSpot Website Grader
HubSpot is a well-known company for their marketing and CRM solution, however, back in 2007, it launched a website grader tool that helped understanding performance and optimization opportunities. Like many other tools for SEO analysis, it is very simple to use, simply add a website URL and wait a few seconds for tips.
Moz Seo Toolbar
Moz offers several paid SEO tools that help website owners understand how to improve their SEO strategy. There are, however, also free tools, such as the Moz SEO Toolbar. This is a simple add-on that quickly helps to analyze any website. Although it doesn’t give you any suggestion per se on what to do or how to fix it, the tool helps to easily identify where problems might be.
2. Influencer Research
As part of improving your SEO results, you will need to make sure to reach out to relevant influencers in your industry to share the content created. Making good use of influencers can increase your website social presence and shares across different platforms. However, reaching out to influencers can be a daunting task. Sending hundreds of emails hoping for an answer is not a scalable activity.
For this reason, it’s important to use tools to identify the right influencers and content to increase the chances to get an answer and successfully increase brand awareness.
Best Automation Tools For Influencer Research
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo allows users to search the Internet for the most shared content and influencers. By using it, website owners can not only identify interesting people to reach out to but also get ideas on what content gets the most attention online.
Ahrefs Content Explorer
Ahrefs has a lot of similarities with BuzzSumo. The content explorer tool allows bloggers to find thousands of interesting topics shared online. In similar ways, users can get immediate insights on what is trending for specific topics the website focuses on.
Social Animal
Social Animal is another widely used tool very similar to BuzzSumo. It helps website owners and marketers understand how certain topics are shared across different social media. The tool also helps to find out influencers per keyword.
NinjaOutReach
This tool focuses exclusively on identifying influencers per keyword searched. Like others, it also helps you find the most shared content online, however, its power is on the influencer research. When performing a query, users will also be able to find email addresses and other contact information, which make the outreach activity extremely simple.
SentiOne
SentiOne is a social listening tool for bloggers and website owners that help to identify interesting content that is shared online as well as brand mentions. When working on influencers outreach, users might want to focus on those who are already familiar with their brand. This tool helps to find out exactly this.
3. Keywords and Backlinks Monitor
When it comes to SEO, one of the most important things to do, constantly, is to check how well you rank for certain keywords as well as who is linking to your website. Keeping an eye on the best keywords will help you understand what to focus on for new content creation. On the other side, understanding which website is linking to your content can help you identify potential partners as well as understanding what content gets the most attention.
Doing this without manually, however, requires several hours (to be optimistic) and it can be difficult to get a good picture of what to do with the results. Automating this task can help you save time and make better decisions.
Best Automation Tools For Keywords and Backlinks Monitor
SE Ranking
This is a great tool that helps to automate activities such as backlink monitoring, keyword research, rankings, and website analysis. Users can get insights also on competitors’ strategies. SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO tool, this means that once purchased the license, you will get access to all the tools available.
Moz
Moz offers more than what we saw previously. The tools available for the paid and free version allow users to analyze backlinks and keywords. Like any other tools, it is very simple to use and creates awareness on where the brand stand against its competitors. The free version offers limited analysis capabilities but still enough to get started with an SEO strategy.
Semrush
Semrush allows users to identify your competitor’s best keywords, observe position changes in domains, uncover long tail keywords for websites and for PPC campaigns. By combining the tools available for keywords research, website owners can uncover long-tail keywords without dealing with multiple spreadsheets.
Ahrefs
Like other keywords and backlinks monitor tools, Ahrefs’ solution helps users understand what are the best keywords available for volume, ranking and it also offers alternative suggestions. The tool includes several options for website owners and marketers to easily analyze competitors’ activities, new or lost backlinks as well as brand mentions to work on a proper SEO strategy.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog has been designed for SEO/SEM-minded marketers. There’s a free desktop version available for download where users can easily analyze URLs for common SEO issues. It is a blessing from the sky, considering that if you have a fairly large website, such analysis could take hours, if not days.
4. Social Sharing
According to Google, social media shares are not an SEO ranking factor. So, why bother? Although not directly correlated to ranking, social signals, such as comments, likes and also shares have a direct impact on how “popular” your content is. If your content gets shared several times on different social media, this might not impact the ranking per se, however, it amplifies your content visibility. At the same time, the more time your content gets shared online, the more Google, and other search engines, will “hear” that people like what you are working on. Getting a higher social engagement can directly affect the organic traffic your website or blog gets. However, sharing manually content can be a very lengthy and difficult process, therefore, automating this task could help you get better results.
Best Automation Tools For Social Sharing
Buffer
The buffer is one of the most popular social sharing tools available in the market. In the free version, users can connect up to 3 social accounts. With Buffer, website owners won’t have to login in every single platform each time to share content. The tool does everything automatically and with time it starts also to learn the best time to share content based on the engagement received.
HootSuite
Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite helps website owners in managing social media activities, from social sharing to keywords tracking. The main benefit is that users have one single place to access all their social media profiles, which saves quite a lot of time.
SproutSocial
Sprout Social has a cleaner dashboard compared to its competitors. In addition to the usual features, if there are more than one users accessing the tool, there are simple customizations available to assign tasks to each team members. It comes also with in-depth analytics connected with Google Analytics, setting the tool apart from many of its kind.
TweetDeck
This is a completely free tool aimed at managing an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. Although specific for Twitter alone, the level of customization is so high that is worth a mention. It can also be downloaded as desktop software and it has integration with Buffer.
Social Pilot
This tool helps users automate social media postings across different social media platforms. If users have an eCommerce website, SocialPilot actually automates the product additions to different websites. It comes with a Google Chrome extension and it has over 300 integrations
Conclusion
SEO is a tough nut to crack. It requires time and effort to master and eventually see some results. SEO automation tools become crucial as the activities to track increase daily. Although all these solutions are here to save time (and money eventually), you still need to take care of them and invest resources. Your SEO strategy gets better and easier to develop with all these excellent tools, however, it’s crucial to understand that just using some of these won’t make your life easier. As a matter of fact, it’s best to check first what makes sense for you to implement in your day-to-day activities and slowly start automating some tasks. If you blindly add more tools to the mix, you might actually end up wasting more time.
Author Bio: Luca is an experienced sales executive and business coach with a background of over 10 years in sales and management. When not working, Luca runs one of the leading online magazines for startup knowledge, MyStartupLand, with the aim of providing meaningful and helpful content to startup founders and business people. You can also find him on Twitter & Facebook
