Can SEO Be Automated?

“Can SEO be automated?” The short answer is, “Yes. Sort of.”

The long answer is … well, the long answer is in this blog. So, if the first answer didn’t fully satisfy your curiosity, then keep on reading!

Core Principles of SEO

Before we get into which parts of your SEO strategy are appropriate for automation and how this might affect your overall content creation goals, let’s go over some basics. Search engine optimization — just in case you weren’t sure what “SEO” stood for — is the art and science of ranking higher on a search engine results page (SERP). 

This is important because the higher your website ranks in search results, the more organic traffic it will receive. You want as many people as possible to find your website via a quick Google search (or on Bing, DuckDuckGo or Ecosia).

Here are some key principles of SEO:

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO is all about the under-the-hood mechanics of what makes a page go up or down in the search engine rankings. Technical SEO best practices include increasing page load speed, optimizing pages for mobile, submitting a sitemap to Google and fixing duplicate content on your site.
• Keyword research: This involves using an SEO tool — Google Analytics, Semrush, Ahrefs, etc. — to find the most common words and phrases people search for that relate to your business. Knowing this helps you create relevant content.
• Content marketing: Once you’re equipped with the right keywords, you can start to generate content around them. Consistently creating high-quality, engaging and optimized content that captures search intent is a proven method of rising up the search rankings.
• User experience (UX): This is where those technical SEO efforts pay off. Creating a welcoming, easy-to-use website is crucial. You might generate content that’s top quality, but if reading it is an unpleasant experience, people simply won’t.
• Link building: The more (reputable) pages that link to your site, the more search engine crawlers will value it. This includes internal links between different pages on your website and external links from pages on other sites.

Manual SEO vs. Automated SEO

Effective SEO strategies blend manual processes with automated ones. The key is to know what requires human intervention and which routine tasks you can automate to save time.

So, what can you automate? And how? Some aspects of SEO you can automate include:

Topic Ideation

This is where we introduce artificial intelligence (AI) to the story. AI tools provide new and effective ways to automate parts of your SEO content strategy. And this goes beyond posting a deluge of minimally edited AI-generated content (that won’t work). But what will work is using an AI chatbot to brainstorm. AI can search the web for relevant topics and suggest different angles and ideas for your content.

Keyword Research

There are several tools (Moz’s Keyword Explorer, Semrush’s Keyword Magic, etc.) available to help you create a list of targeted keywords. Some tools can also help identify which keywords your competitors are ranking for.

SEO Report Creation

An SEO report is an important tool for monitoring SEO performance. Creating these reports can be time-consuming, though. A tool such as Looker Studio can automatically create SEO reports, pulling data from sources such as Google Analytics and comparing it across a given time frame.

SEO Content Creation

You can also automate how you create content. But it’s important to be careful with this. Simply going to a popular AI chatbot online and asking it to please write about X while using Y keyword isn’t a great strategy. All that will do is churn out poorly written content with a low SEO score.

However, there are AI writing experts who know what prompts to use to get good writing and how to edit and punch up AI generated copy. Furthermore, there are now amazing platforms available — such as contentmarketing.ai — that can produce specialized SEO copy without all the hallmarks of something dashed off with ChatGPT, Gemini or Co-Pilot.

Last, you can actually use AI to re-optimize older content, boosting its SEO score. This saves you time from having to rewrite a perfectly good and accurate blog or landing page just because the search engine algorithm has changed.

Monitoring

Regular SEO audits identify issues hindering your SEO efforts. Numerous SEO automation tools can help with this, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider (yes, that’s actually what it’s called). Automation options here include scheduling recurrent website crawls and automatically exporting any reports to your chosen folder after each crawl.

Keyword Tracking

SEO automation tools can also help you track keyword rankings by monitoring search word volume fluctuation. For example, with Ahrefs, you can input the keywords you want to track and observe their rankings in the dashboard. You can also opt to receive regular email updates with keyword ranking reports.

Pros and Cons of Automating SEO

Here are some benefits and drawbacks of SEO automation:

Pros of Automating SEO

• Cost-effectiveness: Automation saves time, and time is money. The less time an SEO team or digital marketing agency spends on laborious, menial SEO labor, the more time they can focus on more creative or productive tasks.
• Scalability: As automation tools streamline repetitive tasks, it becomes easier to take on more projects. If you want to increase your content optimization efforts, automation is key.
• Increased accuracy and consistency: Humans make mistakes. Punching in the wrong letter or number when doing keyword research can negatively affect SEO outcomes. By repeating tasks precisely, automation tools reduce inaccuracies.
• Better analytics: It’s tough to know if you have a good SEO score just by counting up keywords; an automated platform can do this instantly and more accurately. Better yet, automated analytics can go deeper into the data or amass a broader array of information, equipping SEO marketers with more knowledge.

Cons of Automated SEO

• Overreliance on tools: Have you ever tried to text on your mobile phone with autocorrect off? Chances are, you’ve become reliant on autocorrect to fix your errant thumbs. This probably isn’t a problem, but delegating all your creativity or insight to AI may render you unable to think outside the box when necessary. Furthermore, if an automation platform goes down, you could find yourself unable to do things the manual way.
• Lack of oversight: Whatever automated SEO processes you decide to implement, you have to oversee them. You should always have a human check AI’s work, whether it’s generating content or suggesting keywords. AI doesn’t make mistakes the same way humans do, but it can replicate errors it finds or misunderstand the assignment.
• Vulnerability to algorithmic changes: SEO is forever at the whims of the somewhat capricious and impenetrable decisions of search engine crawlers. And the more we rely on AI and robots to work for us, the more their algorithms change in ways that aren’t readily understandable.
• Issues with customizability: AI is great at telling you what’s already out there. And the more you use it, the more it replicates what it sees. Whether it’s giving you topics that have been done a thousand times or keywords that everyone else is using, there’s a tendency towards convention and repetition. This again shows how AI is great for providing an SEO and content framework — but a human is great at customizing and finishing the job.

How Has AI Changed SEO Automation?

AI has changed — and will change — a lot in marketing, and SEO is no different. When organizations see so much hype around technology and they choose to invest in it, they may want to try to solve every problem with it. After all, if you spend a lot of money on a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails.

This means the temptation to overuse or misuse AI will be strong. But the risk of not using it at all probably means you’ll fall behind. When developing an SEO strategy today, it’s crucial to consider how AI will factor into it, such as examining ChatGPT and SEO and how the two affect each other.

You don’t want to be a Luddite, but it’s OK to start by just dipping your toes in the AI waters. For example, HubSpot offers AI tools that are fairly intuitive and can help you learn how to use this evolving technology to up your SEO efforts. AI search grader is another option to help you establish SEO AI use.

How To Automate SEO Wisely

A good first step for any automation plan is to start with repetitive tasks. Humans get bored — robots do not. When we humans (yes, there really is a human being writing this, just in case you wondered) get bored, our minds wander and we can become inattentive, sloppy or procrastinate. By automating repetitive tasks, such as keyword research or SEO score tabulation, you spare staff (or yourself) menial labor, freeing up time for the more creative aspects of SEO.

No matter how far you want to go with automation, make sure a human being is managing the entire process. You can enable alerts to flag when human oversight is necessary. It’s also crucial to track your SERP position periodically. You want to stay on top of any drops down the SEO ranking ladder. Similarly, performing a site audit every now and then keeps you abreast of how successful your semi-automated SEO process is.

Find What Works for You

SEO is not a hard science — it’s forever changing. Don’t be afraid to work by trial and error; after all, A/B testing is key to SEO success.

And don’t shy away from asking for advice. There’s a lot of help available to you, and not just AI tools.