There’s no doubt about it: SEO is a tricky game.

It’s one thing to get your website optimized for search engines, but it takes a whole other level of finesse to stay ahead of the curve as your competitors try to outrank you. 

You have to put in a lot of work to achieve and maintain good rankings, ROI, and traffic. In fact, 59.7% of SEO professionals say they spend 4-15 hours per week optimizing each website they run.

That means a lot of time invested in SEO —time that could be used to bring in more leads or create more revenue.

So, what’s the solution? 

Well, with 75% of marketers reporting that they currently use at least one kind of automated marketing tool, it’s clear that automation is the name of the game these days.

Automating SEO tasks through software can give you a leg up over your competitors by helping you with tedious tasks like keyword research, content ideation, data reports, or site optimization.

Actually, a recent study has shown that marketers who use automation software increase their productivity by approximately 20%.

And even if you’ve been doing SEO for years and have a finely-tuned system down that works really well, it never hurts to take advantage of new tools that make getting more traffic easier than ever before.

In this blog post, I’m going to tell you about the best SEO automation software on the market. I’ll go over both free and paid options so that you can pick the one that works best for your budget and needs.

When is automated SEO a good thing?

First, let’s start by talking about those situations where SEO automation can be helpful. After all, there are many areas in the SEO process that can’t be completely automated.

Google’s algorithm is so complex it uses more than 200 factors to rank websites, which means you still need humans at the helm.

Automation can help you collect data quickly and easily, but there’s no substitute for intuition and expertise when it comes time to make meaningful changes based on SERP’s trends.

However, there are certain aspects of SEO that can definitely benefit from automation software. For example:

Reporting

It can be difficult to generate reports manually without making mistakes or overlooking important details. 

Automated reporting tools make it easy to pull all your data together in one place and use it to create reports that include everything from keyword rankings to traffic sources to clickthrough rates on specific landing pages.

Keyword research

This is one of the most time-consuming elements of SEO. With over 4 billion searches on Google every day, there’s so much data to sift through. 

Automation here is key to taking the guesswork out of finding good keywords that are relevant to your business. 

These tools will give you insight into how keywords are performing in search engines and where there might be more opportunities for growth, which can help you identify untapped opportunities that would otherwise have been missed. 

Analyzing and monitoring backlinks

It can be incredibly time-consuming to manually check your backlinks every day, see how they’re performing, which ones have been flagged by Google, etc. 

That’s why SEO automation tools are so helpful here —they allow you to quickly see who is linking to your site, what those links look like, and where those links are pointing.

Website audits

Since you can boost organic traffic by as much as 106% by refreshing or updating old articles, it’s always a good idea to check if your website content could use some sprucing up. 

Organic search before & after post update stats
Source: Hubspot

Website audits can help you with this, but they take a lot of time. Automating this task makes it easy to evaluate your site without having to spend every minute digging through your content looking for problems!

Trends insights

It’s important to stay on top of what’s trending in your niche, and you can do this by analyzing search data and looking at related topics. 

This may be difficult for humans, who might not be able to keep up with all of the new information that’s being created every day.  

Automation software, on the other hand, allows you to do it in just a few clicks.

Competitor research 

When you’re trying to figure out what your competitors are doing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just give up. 

But if you use an SEO automation tool that collects data from all of your competitors, you can quickly see what they are doing right and where they are falling short. 

This will help you decide where your own strategy needs to go next.