Creating a website to take your business to online business is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough. To take advantage of the billions of online shoppers, you need to figure out ways of driving traffic to the business website. One of the long-term solutions to the problem of traffic is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

When done properly, SEO (on page and off page SEO) will increase organic search traffic to your website. With good SEO, you are able to drive targeted traffic from Google and other search engines to your website – for FREE.

When you automate your SEO strategies, it will take you a fraction of the time and other resources required to rank a site thus improve your returns on investment.

4 Ways Automation Will Save Time, Effort and Money

With the power of SEO automation under your belt, it gives you the power to handle the tasks that were too tedious and time consuming in the past – without the need of an SEO team.

Unfortunately, it is 2016 and most business owners are yet to leverage the power of SEO automation.

The following are some of the SEO tasks you can automate to save your business time, effort, and money:

1. Site Audit

Google, Bing and other search engines now pay more attention to the technical quality of a website.

The common technical issues the search engines pay attention to are: load speed, broken links, size of title and meta tags, number (and quality) of outbound links, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and redirects.

You can manually conduct site audits to make sure the website is in order. However, when the site is more than 10 pages, manual site audits will be tedious and time wasting. This calls for automated site audits.

With automated SEO, you are able to keep your large site free of broken links, bad redirects, duplicate title and Meta tags and missing or bad XML sitemaps.

2. Reverse Engineering Your Competitors’ Rankings

One of the easiest ways to attain high search engine rankings is to observe what your successful competitors are doing and reverse engineer.

You can observe their on-page SEO tactics like use of keywords/LSI, title tags (H1s, H2s, etc.), meta content and site structure, load speed, robots.txt, and sitemaps. Use the information to improve on your sites on-page SEO.

You can also monitor your competitor’s off-page SEO factors such as backlinks (count, source, anchor text variation, and quality), social signals, and keyword rankings. Again, use the information to improve your website’s off-page SEO or let a SEO reseller company do it for you.

The above is easy and straight forward when you are dealing with one competitor who has a few pages of web content. When dealing with more than one competitor and competitors with hundreds of pages, you need to automate the process.

By automating, you speed up the process of reverse engineering your competitors’ rankings. You get time spent to under 5 minutes of user input.

3. Monitoring Your Rankings

Monitoring your site rankings is the easiest way to track SEO success. As you implement your on-page and off-page SEO strategies, you need to monitor your website’s rankings for your target keywords.

When you monitor your rankings, you are able to tell what is working and what is not. This way you will be able drop what is not working and concentrate on what is.

Although you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to monitor keyword positions, their data is days old. If your need accurate and up-to-date data, you need to use the services of a SEO reseller company.

4. Advanced Keyword Research

You can conduct keyword research the traditional way – manually plugging your seed keywords into Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and get suggestions – or automate the process. Manual keyword research is tedious and time wasting. To be efficient, go for automation.

SEO software will automatically grab keywords from Google’s Keyword tool, Google’s autosuggest, add LSI, and then analyze them for competitiveness.

Who Needs SEO Software?

Any person who has an online business needs to have access to a SEO platform. Whether you choose to handle SEO yourself or outsource to an agency, you need to have an access to a SEO software/platform.

SEO automation is a great way to increase efficiency in optimizing both technical and content elements of Web pages.