The Marketer’s Complete Guide to SEO Automation

As marketers, we understand the importance of SEO in driving traffic and generating leads. But all too often, our efforts are hindered by a lack of resources or time.

That’s why many marketers use automation to streamline their SEO processes and focus on other growth strategies.

In this guide, you’ll explore what SEO tasks can be automated to save at least three hours daily. You’ll also find out which essential SEO tools you should have in your arsenal to create an effective SEO strategy quickly and efficiently.

Let’s get started!

What is SEO automation?

What SEO tasks can be automated?

13 Essential SEO Automation Tools

What is SEO automation?

SEO automation is the process of automating repetitive SEO tasks you previously did manually, like managing meta tags, optimizing images, and tracking analytics. It can also track fluctuations in search engine rankings and generate reports.

SEO optimization tools help marketers save time and resources while building an effective SEO strategy.

What SEO tasks can be automated?

Say goodbye to manual labor and hello to efficiency with SEO automation! Here are just a few of the tasks that can be automated with the right toolkit in hand.

1. Keyword research. Automation helps to quickly identify keywords relevant to your target audience for high-value traffic opportunities.

2. Content creation. Generate quality blog posts and website content with AI-driven writing services and make sure you’ve sprinkled enough keywords throughout the piece.

   SurferSEO, for instance, will provide you with these suggestions as you write.

3. Automated structured data markup. Generate and validate structured data for your site in a heartbeat.

4. Technical optimization. Save time on page speed optimization and technical audits while avoiding mistakes thanks to automated checks. Tools for an SEO audit will crawl your website and generate a report on any issues they find.

5. Reporting and analytics. Automatically generate reports to track SEO performance with analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and others.

   Get instant insights into how much traffic you are getting, what content is performing the best, where your visitors are coming from, etc.

6. Automated rank tracking. Monitor how you rank for target keywords in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Track competition and fluctuations in the SERPs and get alerted when a competitor’s content ranks higher than yours for a keyword.

7. Automated image optimization. Automatically optimize images for SEO to improve page loading times without losing image quality.

8. Backlink Analysis and Interlinking. Find backlink opportunities, monitor competitor links, and get suggestions for internal linking to create a natural-looking link profile for your website.

With automation, marketers can create more effective SEO strategies faster and easier than ever. If you are ready to take your SEO efforts to the next level, keep reading and find awesome SEO automation software for different tasks.

13 Essential SEO Automation Tools

We’ve gathered the 13 best SEO automation platforms to help you eliminate painstaking SEO work. Although each tool has many features, we’ll focus on a few of the most notable.

1. HubSpot Marketing Software

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HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software provides actionable recommendations on optimizing your website for SEO, ranked in order of priority, so you can target the areas that most need improvement.

This tool can help you strategize your content to organize your website by topic, a critical component that search engines consider.

It also offers suggestions for topics your audience is interested in so you can expand your blog and draw those people in.

You can also get detailed reports on what terms and topics people are searching for, clickthrough rates, total impressions, and other vital metrics. See clearly what’s working for your site and where there’s room for improvement.

Best for: HubSpot’s Marketing Hub users.

Pricing: Included with Marketing Hub’s Professional plan.

Alternative: SurferSEO.

2. SurferSEO

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SurferSEO is a content optimization tool that analyzes your page or content outline and compares it to competitors’ pages to find SEO opportunities.

It gives you recommendations on keywords for headings and body text, word count, and the number of images and paragraphs.

SurferSEO auto-suggests keywords to include as you write. You can also create an SEO-optimized outline in a matter of seconds. Altogether, these features save hours when outlining and clustering keywords.

As a matter of fact, ClickUp revealed that SurferSEO has helped them publish 150+ articles and achieve blog traffic growth of 85% in one year.

Best for: Writing SEO-optimized blog posts at scale for B2C and B2B alike.

Pricing: Starts at $59 monthly for the basic plan.

Alternatives: Clearscope, Frase.

3. Looker Studio

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Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) will help you quickly build custom SEO reports and analyze data from Google Analytics, Search Console, SEMrush, and other sources via API.

You can also mine data, combine distinct datasets, and easily audit site performance.

One of Looker’s most outstanding features is its ability to create automated and visually appealing SEO reports. With Looker, you can regularly get insights into key performance metrics and track keyword rankings daily, weekly, or monthly.

Best for: Digital marketing agencies, ecommerce sites, and businesses looking for comprehensive SEO analytics.

Pricing: Free.

Alternatives: Databox, Tableau.

4. Ahrefs

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Ahrefs is an SEO automation platform that helps you identify keyword opportunities, monitor link-building efforts, and analyze competitor visibility in the SERPs.

One of the features we like is Link intersect for a backlink gap analysis. It allows you to compare links between your domain and competitors’ websites to uncover link opportunities that you might have missed otherwise.

Another epic feature is the “best by links” report. With it, you can easily uncover the most linked content on any website. Dig down to see what type of content lands thousands of links to find prospects and inspire link-building tactics.

Finally, use Ahrefs Content Explorer to find unlinked brand mentions and reach out to the website owners to secure a link.

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Best for: SEO professionals who need to monitor, discover, and scale link-building efforts.

Pricing: Starts at $99 monthly for the lite plan.

Alternatives: SEMrush, MajesticSEO.

5. SEMRush

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SEMRush is a suite of automated SEO tools that provide insights into competitor strategies and your domain’s online visibility.

SEMRush also helps you identify keywords to target with its Keyword Magic Tool. This one is especially useful for finding long-tail phrases related to your main topic and organizing them into clusters within a minute.

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We can’t stress enough how time-saving this feature is. Remember when SEO involved working on Excel and Google sheets to group keywords with super complex formulas?

Breathe freely with the SEMRush clustering tool or its alternative Serpstat.

SEMRush also offers a content marketing platform that helps you write SEO-friendly blog posts and optimize them for the SERPs. It even has an SEO writing assistant that suggests content ideas and provides readability scores for your copy.

Best for: SEO professionals who need a comprehensive suite of tools to analyze competitor data, monitor keyword rankings, and optimize content.

Pricing: Starts at $99.95 monthly for the pro plan.

Alternatives: Ahrefs, KeywordTool, Jaaxy, Serpstat.

6. Respona

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Respona is an all-in-one email outreach platform developed specifically with link builders in mind. Desptie this SEO-first positioning, the tool is perfectly usable for other types of outreach too, especially for getting in touch with journalists for PR activities or finding sales opportunities.

Respona includes a search engine (powered by Google for finding pages and by Moz for extracting backlinks), an email finder/verifier, a sequence editor, and an AI-powered article summarizer for quick but meaningful personalization. 

On top of that, it has Relationship tracking (comparable to a CRM), a shared inbox for centralized management of your sender emails, and email health reports. 

Best for: SEO and link building agencies, freelancer outreach specialists, and in-house outreach teams relying on emails for blogger outreach, digital PR, and marketing outreach. 

Pricing: Starts at $99/month for the standard plan.

Alternatives: Pitchbox, Buzzstream, Hunter, Gmass

7. Netpeak Spider

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Netpeak Spider is a technical SEO crawler that audits your website’s structure and finds broken links, duplicate content, and other issues. It also provides insight into the indexability of your pages and can detect malware or malicious code.

Moreover, Netpeak Spider has one of the most advanced filtering systems around. It allows you to customize reports for a more detailed analysis or generate an XML sitemap for submission to Google and other search engines.

Netpeak Spider comes with a convenient integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, so you can easily access data within the same dashboard.

On top of that, the tool supports white-label reports, making life easier for SEO agencies and consultants.

Best for: Agencies and SEO professionals who need to audit website structure, detect issues quickly, and generate white-label reports.

Pricing: Starts at $7 monthly for the starter plan, which allows one user.

Alternatives: Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl.

8. Google Search Console

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Of course, we couldn’t pass by the most powerful and free toolkit for website performance analysis and technical audits.

Google Search Console shares insights into how Google interprets your website. It helps you track and measure organic traffic, set up alerts for potential issues, and get data on clicks, impressions, and query positions.

You can also use Search Console to submit a sitemap directly to Google, run URL inspection and parameters tests, and request re-indexing of pages.

With its “Inspect URL” feature, you can check how Googlebot sees the page and troubleshoot potential problems.

Best for: Everyone who wants to monitor their website’s performance and stay informed about potential issues.

Pricing: Free.

Alternatives: Screaming Frog, Netpeak Spider, AgencyAnalytics, Searchmetrics.

9. Jasper

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Jasper AI Writing Assistant is an AI-driven copywriting tool that generates high-converting content in minutes.

Guide this tool with commands or use templates, like AIDA copies, for LinkedIn, blog posts, e-commerce listings, Google and Facebook ads templates, etc.

Thanks to its AI technology, Jasper can adopt and mimic your tone of voice, cutting off hours on writing copies for different content needs.

For SEO, Jasper AI Writing Assistant can generate creative and snappy meta descriptions, titles, etc. Integrated with SurferSEO, Jasper crafts copies enriched with target keywords.

Use these tools combined to maximize your SEO performance with minimal effort.

Best for: Companies and professionals looking for an AI-driven copywriting solution to quickly generate SEO-friendly content.

Pricing: Starts at $49 monthly for 50,000 words generated.

Alternatives: Writer, CopyAI, WriteSonic.

10. AgencyAnalytics

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AgencyAnalytics provides automated analytics for various platforms, including Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.

This tool also integrates with over 40 marketing tools, like MailChimp and HubSpot, to offer a comprehensive view of campaign performance.

The tool’s SEO suite includes rank tracking, backlink analysis, site audits, social media analytics, and much more.

Best for: SEO agencies and consultants looking for an all-in-one tool to manage campaigns, and track analytics.

Pricing: Starts at $29 per month for the pro plan.

Alternatives: Searchmetrics, Kissmetrics.

11. Technical SEO Automation Tools by Merkle

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Merkle’s SEO tools are explicitly designed to automate various technical SEO tasks.

For example, you can test and validate your robots.txt and generate and submit XML sitemaps to search engines. Or query the Knowledge Graph API to find entities, their MREID, and relevance scores.

Merkel’s SEO automation tools also include a schema generator and SERP simulator. The best part? It’s all for free.

Best for: SEO professionals who need to automate complex technical SEO tasks, like robots.txt validation and structured data markup.

Pricing: Free.

Alternative: Schemantra.

12. Compress PNG

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Compress PNG is an online tool that lets you quickly and easily compress PNG images. It’s a great way to speed up page load times and reduce file size, which can help improve SEO performance.

Leverage Compress PNG to convert files from JPEG and GIF formats for better compatibility with browsers. Use this tool in tandem with another to improve your overall SEO strategy.

Best for: Anyone looking for an easy and free way to compress PNG images.

Pricing: Free.

Alternatives: TinyPNG, Compressor.io.

13. AccuRanker

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AccuRanker is an advanced rank-tracking solution for SEOs and marketers. It offers real-time insights into how your website performs in organic search and helps you identify changes in ranking over time.

The tool also provides detailed analytics, including accuracy scores, Share of Voice, and search engine position history. You can even set up automated alerts to stay on top of any changes in rankings or visibility.

With its advanced keyword filtering, you can quickly create tailored reports for specific searches, locations, or devices.

It also includes a drag-and-drop Master Filter, which allows you to group several keywords and track their performance simultaneously.

Best for: Enterprises and SEO agencies; for rank tracking.

Pricing: Starts at $130 monthly and offers 1,000 keywords to track. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Alternatives: SEMrush, Ahrefs, SERPWoo, Serpstat, SE Ranking.

Making the Most of SEO Automation

SEO automation is a game-changer for businesses looking to optimize their website and increase their online visibility. Companies can focus on higher-level strategy and creativity by streamlining SEO tasks.

With the right tools, SEO automation can lead to more efficient, effective, and successful campaigns.

So why wait? Embrace the power of SEO automation today and supercharge your online presence!