November 8

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Is SEO Automation Whitehat Or Blackhat?

By Brian Petersen

November 8, 2020

content marketing, SEO Automation

SEO automation is something many webmasters consider, but it is a good strategy, or do you end up harming your website?

In this blog post, I will try to give you a heads up about how to use SEO automation tools and what you should avoid doing.

What kind of SEO tasks can be automated

Examples of the use of SEO automation tools

There are many examples where mots webmasters would use SEO automation to speed up their work and optimize tedious tasks. Here are a few examples:

  • Rank tracking: Monitoring of your keywords position in Google
  • Crawling of the website: Running audits to locate technical SEO errors that can negatively impact.
  • Keyword research: Discover keywords that have enough volume to target
  • Link analysis: Examine competitors link profile to find link opportunities
  • Link building: Build automated links
  • Outreach: Using software to keep track of outreach campaigns
  • Image optimization: Using plugins to optimize images (Often used on WordPress sites)
  • Content optimization: Use a tool to write and structure SEO content

Automation of rank tracking

There is absolutely no harm in using rank tracking automation – I seriously doubt that any webmaster would sit and enter hundreds of Google keywords daily! 🙂

Pro Rank tracker is an example of a rank tracker that can track both mobile and desktop rankings. It is a great little cloud-based tool that can carry out the rank tracking and send you a daily report.

At the moment, Pro Rank Tracker offers a free trial with 2 URLs and tracking of 20 keywords for free.

Crawling of your website – Technical SEO Automation

You probably don’t want to go through each of your URLs daily, and if you rely only on warnings from Google Search Console, you might face a situation where you are already facing indexing issues.

Therefore it is mandatory that you are able to automate schedule an SEO audit for your site.

SEMrush is a great all-around Cloud Based tool that can crawl your website on a schedule and inform you what (and how) you can fix any indexing issues. SEMrush offers a 7-day free trial.

SEMrush is able to provide a lot of insights and is considered by many SEO experts as one of the best SEO tools on the market.

Keyword research automation

Before you can create a content strategy, you need to find out which keyword you should target.

You need valuable keywords with a decent search volume, and you also need to make sure that it realistic for you to actually rank in Google if you decide to go for a specific keyword.

Again SEMrush is a great tool to determine which keywords to target and how competitive the different keywords might be.

Link analysis – How and where did your competitors get their links from?

Analyzing a link profile of one or more competitors requires a tool. Many SEO´s prefer Ahrefs or Majestic when they examine link profiles.

SEMrush also has a link analyzing module, and SEO Power Suite is another all-in-one solution.

Link building automation tools

There are a lot of tools that can be used for link building. However, link building is one of the most time-consuming SEO tasks.

This is also one of those tasks where automation tools can cause the biggest damage to your website.

Mark my words: When it comes to link building, it is always quality above quantity. 

It might be tempting to power up any tool that promised to make you thousands of links on autopilot – but if you don’t know exactly what you are doing, it can kill your website almost overnight.

The typical scenario of those SEO automated tools that build links is basically just spamming your website with thousands of low-quality links.

 It can be forum profile links, blog comment links, or directory links.

Another risk is that those tools send links to the same URL or the front page with similar anchor text.

Google has been fighting webspam for many years – in 2012, they launched an algorithm called Penguin.” It has been constantly updated ever since.

Penguins’ main purpose is to determine link profiles that have been manipulated (Black Hat SEO). If you are gaining thousands of low-quality links in a short time, do you think it looks spammy? Oh yes.!

Outreach – Whitehat SEO automation

Outreach/Guest blogging can be automated

Many Search Engine Optimizers struggle with blogger outreach. This is a strategy you use when locating niche relevant websites willing to shout your site by adding a link.

Outreach is also referred to as “Guest Blogging For SEO.” You contact a webmaster and offer him or her to write a quality blog post for their users in return for a backlink to your site.

Using this strategy would gain highly relevant quality traffic, and your audience would be real users interested in your niche.

Outreach can be fully automated – read my Link Assistant Review here.

Image optimization – A task most webmaster or editors tends to forget

Image optimization is plain boring – and that is probably why most of us forget it now and then. However, load speed is a critical part of technical SEO.

Huge images do not help you improve your rankings in the Search Engines, so even it is boring, it is highly recommended that you do it.

If you are running a WordPress site, you are lucky! Some smart people have made a plugin called Shortpixel.

Shortpixel optimizes and smush all of your images in the background without any user interference. This is a brilliant and easy way how to solve one of your most boring SEO tasks.

Content optimization – Not the way to go fully automated

Many SEO automation tools offer the possibility to auto-generate content. Some tools can syndicate content from other websites.

Other tools or software can spin articles by replacing synonyms in an existing article, making them “unique.”

Even though it might be tempting, auto-generated content will not impress your audience or search engines.

The goal is not only to rank – and real users would be able to determine if your content is machine-generated crap – and so is Google.

If your goal is to make some sales, then serve quality content for your target audience within your industry.

That is also going to help improve your rankings in the organic search results.

Content marketing automation – The right way of doing digital marketing

“Work smarter – not harder” is something you probably heard hundreds of times before.

Content marketing should be one of your cornerstones in your marketing strategy.

I am not talking about pulling out a ton of well-crafted blog posts with original content – you need to be a little smarter than that. (Even it’s a good starting point!).

You need to feed the beast – and realize that Google is a computer, and computers run on algorithms and they eat and crunch: DATA,

With the amount of content available (and increasing every second!) it is impossible for Google to fully grasp every single word or phrase written in a document.

Instead, it needs to look for similarities – what kind of words would show up in articles related to the same search query.

The good thing is, you can do the same!

It is all about data gathering and comparison when you try to grab your spot in the Search Engine Rankings.

Naturally, your website should be user-friendly, but you also need to optimize (and improve your content) compared to the top ten results that are already on page one in Google.

A couple of months ago a brilliant tool called Frase was released – and that is able to carry out exactly that.

Frase would examine all the results that are already ranking on page one in Google, and it has a built-in editor.

This editor can help you structure your content so it would improve your rankings and drive organic traffic to your website.

But don’t just take my word for it – Frase offers a free trial so test it out now.

Conclusion: Manual or automated SEO?

Hopefully, this blog post gave you a little insight into the different types of areas that can be automated.

My advice is that you automate every single process that can speed up your productivity.

Automated reports of audits can help you make the right decisions and keep track of your SEO efforts,

The two areas where I would be careful is link building and content creation – this is where your focus should be on.

I hope you got some insights and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

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