This post was sponsored by seoClarity. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
We all know SEO is hard.
SEO at the enterprise level? Even harder.
With sites that consist of thousands (or millions) of pages and multiple teams managing it, the entire team needs to work together, then wait countless weeks or months for it to be prioritized, then implemented.
It doesn’t help that SEO teams are typically small, under-resourced, and wear multiple hats.
And the likelihood of actually getting your projects prioritized with the IT team is slim to none because of conflicting priorities.
These roadblocks come together to form one of the largest SEO challenges: Lack of time on the path from data, to insights, to execution, to results.
While automating rank tracking, reporting, site crawls, and links gives SEO professionals access to large data sets that allow them to make smarter decisions, the SERP continues to become more complex.
Look how this one query, “hotels”, has changed over the past five years.
Google can understand well beyond what’s on a single page – it considers content’s relevance, the overall page experience, and plenty more.
SEO professionals can’t singlehandedly keep up with the pace of Google’s advancements.
There’s too much data to act on for any human agent alone. Automation, however, works around the clock and can generate insights that would otherwise take hours to reach.
With Google’s fast pace of change, we have no time to waste.
The Evolution of SEO Automation
At seoClarity, we identified three generations of SEO automation:
- Gen 1: Data collection and aggregation
- Gen 2: Insights generated from data
- Gen 3: Continuous execution and implementation
If you haven’t automated your data collection and aggregation, stop here. The basic level of automation needs to come first!
You can’t move on to the next step if you’re still collecting and aggregating data manually while being an Excel jockey trying to make sense of it all.
Automation in Action
Generation 1: Data Aggregation
Data collection, aggregation, and reporting form the foundation of automation. That’s why you can’t skip this if you haven’t set a foundational base.
Most of what’s been written about SEO automation covers the topic through this lens. If you search for “seo automation” or “seo automation tools” you’ll read articles about rank trackers, site audit data, and automated reporting.
An easy step here is to find technology that can collect and aggregate all this data together for you.
After all, SEO professionals report spending more than 50% of their time on tasks that can be easily automated.
Use an SEO platform like seoClarity to consolidate your data and automate your reporting to measure the results based on the exact change you make to your site and their impact on your search visibility.
Generation 2: Generated Insights
This next level of automation generates insights from the data.
Its purpose is to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to surface priority issues, opportunities, and low-hanging fruit opportunities.
Some examples of this are:
- Automated Alerts: Software sends out ranking reports if certain thresholds are met.
- On-Page Recommendations: Software detects and prioritizes elements that need fixing or improving.
- Monitoring Site Changes: Page monitoring for critical page element changes before they sink your SEO efforts.
- Advanced Insights: Site-specific insights into key opportunities and issues.
Second-gen automation works well beyond human capabilities in data analysis to surface insights in real-time.
An example of this is seoClarity’s Actionable Insights, which analyzes all of your site data in a single click to present actionable opportunities customized with low, medium, high priority based on your team’s ability to implement.
You can think of it as your 24/7 SEO analyst. It analyzes piles of data for you so you can prioritize your time where it counts.
Generation 3: Scale Execution
We’ve seen how automation has evolved over the years, but people still largely don’t understand its full potential.
True automation helps you compress the time from data to results. It’s not a tool that simply replaces manual work.
It’s time to redefine SEO automation.
Ask yourself: Have you automated all of your data and insights?
If so, you’ll find that you can get results much faster. But if you haven’t, then you may be caught in Generation 1 or 2 of automation (and should establish these processes before you move on to Generation 3).
Gen 3 offers automated implementation and execution – completely at scale.
This revolutionizes the way SEO professionals approach their work. Automation can now deploy live updates to the site so the insights from generation 2 can be instantly acted upon.
The ability to execute on-demand and at scale is the most sophisticated SEO automation to date.
Be on the first wave to leverage this gen 3 automation in organic search.
Join the list for beta access, exclusive research, and case studies that show the amazing results from seoClarity clients.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by seoClarity. Used with permission.
In-post Image: Image by seoClarity. Used with permission.
