10 Best Automatic SEO Software (Free & Paid)

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. 

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.

Traffic analysis 

When it comes to website traffic, you need to be able to track your progress and see how well your SEO efforts are working. 

An automated tool makes it easy for you to measure the effectiveness of any changes that you make in order to improve your site’s performance over time.

Content optimization

In order to rank on SERPs, you need to ensure your content complies with the ever-changing search engine guidelines and best practices. 

SEO automation software can easily help you identify issues on your pages and suggest improvements where appropriate.

Top 5 Free SEO automation software

Now, let’s get to the nitty-gritty. 

You already know how SEO automation can make your life easier, but with so many options out there, it’s hard to know which ones will actually help you achieve your goals.

Especially when you’re on a budget.

I’ve tested several free SEO automation software, and what I’ve found is that you don’t need to spend a huge amount of money (or nothing at all) if what you want is an easy way to boost your productivity.

Here’s a rundown of some of my favorites:

1) SEOlyzer

SEOlyzer is a simple but powerful tool that lets you analyze and monitor your site’s performance in real-time.

You can use it to track changes made on your site, identify broken links, or categorize your pages. However, its most useful features are:

• Page Analysis. The platform will give you a complete report on how well-optimized your website is for SERPs after checking many different factors like page title, meta description, header tags, content length, or inbound links.

• Site Audit. This tool analyzes all the pages of your website and provides you with an overview of what needs improving. It will also provide suggestions on how to fix any issues that it finds.

• Redirects. If you’ve changed server names or just moved sites completely, this feature is very helpful for keeping any backlinks from old pages pointing to your new domain name/site.

Their free tier is more than enough if you’re just going to be crawling or monitoring one site. You can always upgrade to one of their premium plans or try them with their 7-day free trial.

Pros 

• It lets you perform log analysis in real-time. 
• It makes it easy to monitor if your SEO efforts are on the right track.
• It provides lots of statistics for each one of your site’s pages. 

Cons

• The free plan only allows you to crawl one website each month.

2) Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a desktop-based software that can perform an in-depth audit of your website and automate the process of extracting data from HTML sites, making diagrams to visualize your site’s architecture, or tracking the process of your SEO through URL mapping. 

It’s especially helpful to: 

• Quickly generate an XML sitemap that you can upload to Google Webmaster tools so they can properly crawl your site and index all of its content.
• Identify duplicate content across your site. 
• Check major parameters in your robots.txt files and all directives in your .htacess file. It will then give you a detailed report on what is going on with each one so that you can make any necessary adjustments before Google or Bing comes knocking at your door.

Screaming Frog has a free plan that allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, but you can also dive deeper into the paid version with additional features like page speed monitoring and JS website rendering. 

Pros 

• It extracts valuable points from each page on your site.
• It makes it easy to check a site’s structural hierarchy.
• It crawls through a website very quickly.

Cons

• The free plan doesn’t allow you to schedule crawls.
• If you’re just starting out with SEO, you’ll find it a bit difficult to use.

3) Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a free tool that helps you understand how your audience searches. It gives you insight into what people are looking for, and you can use that data to improve your SEO strategy.

If you want to find out what your audience is most interested in —and get some content ideas while you’re at it— this is a great place to start. It works great for:

• Generating keyword ideas.
• Finding related long-tail keywords to target.
• Finding topics to write about.

The platform’s free plan gives you a limited amount of searches each day. This can be useful for beginners who want to see how the tool works before signing up for a paid account.

Pros 

• It allows you to export your keyword data to spreadsheets and CSV files.
• It gives you a visual representation of your data that makes the information more accessible and easy to understand.
• You don’t need to sign up to start using it

Cons

• There are not enough SEO metrics to consider (e.g, keyword difficulty or search volume)  
• Their Pro plan is expensive.

4) WMS Everywhere

WMS Everywhere is an incredibly easy-to-use online SEO platform that lets you search for keywords and see what the top-ranking pages are, how they perform in Google’s search results, and how many searches they get.

Its free version is pretty straightforward. You can:

• See where your website ranks in the top 100 Google search results.
• Get information about search volume, ads CPC, and potential keywords while navigating on Google using WMS Everywhere’s Chrome extension.
• Get your Google search results in JSON format. This is helpful if you’re more on the technical side of SEO and need to process data easily.

Pros

• Its interface is simple and intuitive, so you can get the most out of it right away.
• You can use the software on any device and access it from anywhere.
• The Chrome extension provides really valuable data for keyword research and content ideation.

Cons

• The reporting tool on the free version allows you to only get one report a day, which means you can’t easily track how your site is performing.

5) Google Analytics

If you’re an SEO veteran, chances are you’ve heard of Google Analytics. In fact, it’s probably the first thing that comes up when you search for “SEO automation tools” on Google.

In a nutshell, Google Analytics is a great software for tracking the performance of your website. It can be used to:

• Analyze the traffic of your website and find out which keywords are generating the most traffic.
• Measure the time spent on your site by visitors, and find out which pages they spend the most time on.
• Determine where visitors are coming from.
• Measure the bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who leave your site immediately after arriving on it.

Google Analytics is free to use, but it also has paid plans that offer additional features such as cross-device tracking and marketing insights.

Pros 

• It’s a great tool for beginners and experts alike.
• You can set up goals and track conversions, which lets you know how well your website is doing.
• You can see what your users are doing on your website, which makes it easier for you to improve your site.

Cons

• Not as user-friendly as other marketing tools.

Top 5 Paid SEO automation software

While free SEO automation tools can help you stay on top of your game, there’s no denying it: they don’t have the same capabilities as paid software.

If you want to get serious about your digital marketing and make sure every aspect of your site is optimized for search engines, you’ll need to invest in a paid solution.

Here are the best SEO automation software I’ve tried:

1) SEMRush

SEMRush offers a ton of data about your website and competitors’ websites, including keyword rankings, traffic estimates, and more.

Specifically, SEMRush‘s features include:

• Keyword research for organic search and PPC keyword selection. In fact, Semrush has over 20 billion keywords in its Keyword Magic database.

• Website auditing & traffic analysis (including backlink analysis)

• Keyword & Content Gap tools

• Competitor analysis 

• Content ideation and optimization tools

One of the best things about SEMRush is that it offers a free trial, so you don’t have to pay before you see if it’s right for you. 

Besides, its premium plans are affordable enough that you don’t have to break the bank to get it —but it still has all the features you need for effective optimization. 

Paid subscriptions start at $119.95/month.

Pros 

• It does a great job of combining all of its tools into one easy-to-use interface.
• It has one of the most comprehensive databases of backlinks, keywords, and domains that you can use to plan your SEO strategy.
• It has almost everything you could want in any SEO automation software.
• It offers a free tier.

Cons

• The free version is limited to 10 searches per day.

2) Ahrefs 

Like SEMRush, Ahrefs is one of the most well-known and widely used SEO tools in the market today. The platform lets you monitor backlinks, track organic traffic and keywords, analyze the performance of search campaigns, and more. 

Overall, Ahrefs offers a lot of the same features as other tools on this list. However, it also has a few that set it apart from its competitors:

• A website crawler that’s second only to Google in terms of activity.
• A huge collection of keywords across 10 different search engines

+171 billion domains, making it possible to compare your site with several others in terms of backlinks, traffic levels, and organic rankings

Ahref’s pricing plans start at $99 per month. However,  if you own a website and can verify it through Google Search Console, you can use its Webmaster Tools for free. 

You won’t get the full Ahrefs experience with it, but you’ll be to audit your site, check your backlinks, and see how well you’re doing in the search engines compared to your competitors.

Pros 

• It offers an incredible amount of data.
• It has a ton of useful features that’ll help you search for keywords, research your competitors, and monitor your backlinks.
• The Traffic Potential feature provides a great way to identify niche keywords that can help you create content that’s likely to draw traffic.

Cons

• Its free option is pretty limited.
• Its user interface can sometimes be a bit slow.

3) Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is an all-in-one automated tool that helps you get more traffic from Google search results. 

It works by analyzing your website and then recommending strategies based on what it finds out about your site’s structure, content, link structure, and other factors that impact how well it ranks on Google’s search engine results pages.

The platform also offers:

• A free keyword analyzer extension for Chrome (Keyword Surfer).
• An outline generator that’s powered by AI to help you create optimized content from scratch.
• An efficient SEO audit tool.

Furthermore, since its integration with SEMRush in June of 2022, you can also get valuable information on link building. 

You can sign up for an account and start using Surfer SEO for $59/month or $588/year, and all plans come with a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Pros 

• It offers a free limited version.
• It can analyze your article for more than 500 ranking factors
• It automatically structures your content following the topic cluster format to help you with internal linking. 

Cons

• It can take you some time to get used to its UI. 

4) Moz Pro

Moz Pro is a comprehensive SEO software that lets you manage all your campaigns in one place. 

You can do keyword research, site audits, link-building strategies, as well as social media management and reporting features. 

There are also detailed analytics reports, so you know how well each campaign is performing.

It’s not cheap —you’ll have to pay $99 per month for the Standard plan or $179 per month for the Medium plan—but the service has a lot of useful features that make it worth every penny.

Pros 

• It offers plenty of useful tools to automate most of your SEO tasks. 
• The paid version has a 30-day trial
• The platform is optimized both for desktop and mobile. 

Cons

• Their paid plans are slightly expensive.

5) DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl is an SEO automation tool that crawls your entire website or specific URLs to provide actionable insights into how to improve your site’s performance. 

The platform’s audits include information on individual pages, such as link data analysis, redirect chains, internal linking suggestions, duplicate content, broken links, and much more. 

You can also use this feature to compare your competitor’s site and strategy to see how they stack up against yours.

Pros 

• It’s one of the fastest web crawlers out there.
• SEO tests can be run automatically, and you can schedule each crawl.
• It offers in-depth technical SEO insights that can help you optimize your site.

Cons

• The amount of information you get can be overwhelming.

Wrap Up

Getting to the #1 spot on Google —and the 32% of all clicks that come with it— requires more than just doing SEO every day. You need to automate the process.

The best thing about it is that these tools can get things done so much faster than you ever could. 

They automatically run through thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of data. 

They monitor what results are working best for your competitors and tweak your page accordingly.

And they even do it all while looking out for any shady tactics that would get around the search engines’ penalties against black hat SEO.

96% of marketers have already implemented one –and if you don’t want to be left in the dust, you need to start using one of these 10 best automatic SEO software options.