Top 5 SEO Automation Tools to Start Ranking Better
Last update: 27 June 2024 at 04:15 pm
5.00/5SEO is a marathon that requires continuous efforts to outrank your competitors, drive more organic traffic, and generate leads that will convert to sales.
Doing it manually is fine but will require more time and energy which you can channel to other aspects of your business.
Does your online business thrive through SEO, and you’re looking for SEO automation tools not just to boost your productivity but also to start ranking better?
This guide is for you as I will show you the top 5 SEO automation tools that will help you start ranking better.
Key Takeaways
- SEO automation saves time and boosts productivity, essential for staying ahead in the competitive online market.
- Surfer SEO offers content optimisation and audit tools
- Ahrefs excels in backlink and keyword analysis
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider identifies technical issues and integrates with Google Search Console
- Answer The Public automates keyword research, focusing on long-tail keywords and trend monitoring
What is SEO Automation?
SEO automation is the process of using tools to automate SEO tasks you need to carry out to boost the ranking of your web pages on search results.
Think of it as having a robot that does 80% of your work while you put in 20% to fine-tune it.
Search engine optimisation can be overwhelming when you do it manually. You get burned out and give your time to a single process leaving the key aspects that require your attention most to suffer.
Technology is advancing and this has given rise to numerous SEO automation tools that hit the digital marketing industry daily.
It’s worth it to have SEO tools that automatically detect broken links, keyword cannibalism, low-quality content, etc.
This is not to say that SEO automation tools will replace occasional hands-on activity and analysis, rather it will streamline your activities.
What Aspects of SEO Can You Automate?
Before we dive into the top 5 SEO automation tools to boost your SEO strategies, you must understand the SEO aspects you can automate.
Site monitoring
Monitoring your site allows you to pay attention to every web page without running a manual check. Search engines like Google and Bing want to offer the best user experience.
So, sites with unsafe security protocols, many broken links, and poor-quality pages will find it hard to appear on search results.
Rank tracking
The main goal of investing in SEO is to rank for as many lucrative keywords as possible.
When you publish tons of keyword-focused content, it becomes hard to track them manually. You will need a tool to monitor them and see what works.
Backlink analysis
Backlinks are links from one website to another. They happen to be one of the top-ranking factors Google bots consider when ranking a web page on search results.
Backlink Analysis lets you see who is linking to your site, how juicy the link is, and how your competitors are building links to outrank you.
Competitor analysis
Your SEO strategy isn’t complete without spying on your competitors to understand what they are up to SEO-wise and plan how to be ahead of them.
That’s where competitor analysis comes in and you can’t successfully do that manually. You need a tool to analyse their strategies, take a clue from their strength and capitalise on their weakness to outdo them.
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Find an agencyTop 5 SEO Automation Tools to Rank Better
As an SEO freelance writer, I have tried different SEO automation tools and below are my top 5 picks:
1. Surfer SEO
You don’t have to guess or manually check why pages rank on the first page of Google for a particular keyword or even on the featured snippet.
Surfer SEO will automatically provide such insight with suggestions on how you can outrank your competitors for that keyword.
It is an all-in-one SEO content intelligence tool that you can rely on to optimise your content and track the performance of your web pages on search engines.
Key Features
Integration
Collaboration with other tools is a hallmark of any SEO automation tool. Surfer integrates with AI copywriting tools like Jasper to enable you to optimise your content without leaving your interface.
If you manage your website or blog on WordPress, you can connect Surfer to it and do your on-page optimisation.
SERP Analyzer
Use the SERP Analyzer to analyze the top 10 page ranking for a particular keyword. Enter the keyword you want to write about and click Analyze.
Within seconds, the SERP Analyzer provides insight into the SEO tactics that make those pages rank high.
These insights include:
- Common backlinks
- Common questions and phrases
- Content score
- Backlink score
- Focus and related keywords
- Word count
Content Planner
If you plan to create a pillar page, the content planner of Surfer SEO will assist you.
Enter the topic you want to write about and you will get suggestions on what topic clusters that will support the pillar page should look like.
Audit Tool
Use the audit tool to improve the position of your pages on search results. Enter your URL and the target keyword in the audit tool to get an insight into the performance of the page against its competitors. Surfer makes recommendations that will boost the ranking.
Content Editor
Planning your content before writing the draft is the first step to creating optimised content.
Enter the keyword you want to write in the content editor and Surfer will generate a structure for your content:
- Number of H2, H3
- Word count
- Number of paragraphs
- Number of images
- NLP terms
- Number of images
- Focus and related keywords ( appropriate numbers)
- Questions and phrases
2. Ahrefs
To ensure your link-building strategy is on point, you need to run a backlink analysis. Ahrefs is one tool that helps you analyse your backlinks.
It has an index of 30.53 trillion known URLs and crawls an estimated 6 billion web pages daily.
You can automatically set the tool to monitor new/lost backlinks or even brand mentions which you can reach out to the site, and request that they link to you.
With the Rank Tracker feature, you can track the content that attracts the most backlinks, plus spy on your competitors to know where their links come from.
Key Features
Cross-linking
This feature gives you insight into the domains that link to your competitors but not you.
Broken links
Collect and filter your links on your website with the aim of identifying broken ones and fixing them.
Keyword explorer
Get useful data about a keyword including:
- Keyword difficulty
- Search volume
- Suggested and related keywords
- Questions that contain the keyword and also include the keyword
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is a suitable tool to automate your technical SEO. This desktop tool runs on-site checks on your website for potential technical and common SEO issues that can negatively impact the performance of your website.
It has a forever-free plan that allows you to crawl only 500 pages at a time. After downloading and installing it on your computer, enter the URL of your website and it will crawl every page it finds.
It is the same way Google bots crawl your site; following links found on the header, footer, and content. You can use it to track keyword cannibalism in your pages, pages with duplicate meta descriptions, short-form and long-form content, orphaned content, etc.
Key Features
Canonical tag report
If you use canonical to prevent content duplication, the canonical report feature will be valuable to you.
It will show you the issues with your canonicals which include 5XX, 3XX, 4XX, or no response code.
Redirect chain report
It’s sometimes hard to identify pages that you redirected to 301 or 302. The redirect chain report shows you all the redirections you did on pages when you clicked the Redirect Chain tab.
Search Console tab
You can easily track the performance of your web pages on search engines from Screaming Frog without logging into Google Search Console.
Once you integrate it with GSC, all the data within a specified period of time will show on the Search Console tab anytime you analyse your URL on Screaming Frog.
It is the same as connecting your website to Google Analytics.
4. Narrato
Ranking higher on SERPs begins with creating content that is optimised for search engines. Gone are the days when you have to guess which SEO tips that can help.
With Narrato, one of the best SEO tools to automate your content, you can create and optimise content that will rank better on Google.
You don’t have to be an SEO content writer. The tool provides insights beginning with generating content ideas, outlines and actually writing the content for you.
Key Features
SEO content brief
It generates a content brief based on the topic or keyword you want to write. This feature is useful if you outsource your content to freelance writers.
It will serve as a guide on how they should write the draft for the content to rank on search engines.
SEO recommendations
You get insight on top keywords that influence ranking, related questions, word count, and other factors that matter in SEO content writing.
5. Answer The Public
If you want to automate your keyword research and pick low-hanging keywords you can easily rank for, Answer The Public is what you need.
Just like the name sounds, it gives you details of what users search for on search engines.
This tool is suitable for beginner bloggers who want to improve their ranking on Google.
When you enter a seed keyword and search for it, Answer The Public shows you different searches related to it. Most of them are long-tail keywords that you can rank for in less time.
Key Features
Monitor & receive alerts for searches
It’s important to keep up with trends in topics you have written about. The Monitor & Alert notifies you of new searches about a particular topic.
This offers you new ideas which you can use to update your content and boost your traffic.
Hide unwanted suggestions
If you think certain suggestions aren’t relevant to the topic you want to focus on, you can hide them.
That allows you to concentrate on suggestions that add value to the content you want to write.
Final Thought on SEO Automation Tools
Doing guesswork can’t improve your ranking on search results. Search engines like Google consider a lot of factors before ranking a page.
These factors continue to change and you can’t figure out all of them. A manual approach won’t give you the desired result and that’s why you should consider automating your SEO.
I have shown you my top 5 SEO automation tools and some awesome features they have. It’s up to you to identify the one that suits your needs and start using them.
With the AI providing insights and automating most of the tasks, you can focus on other SEO aspects that can complement your effort and in the end make you rank better on search engines.
