SEO Automation: Best Practices in 2024

What is SEO automation, and why should you do it?

SEO automation is a way to automate mundane tasks that you’d usually do manually, like rank tracking. Typically, it’s done via third-party or custom-built tools.

The term SEO automation often conjures up thoughts of tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Searchmetrics, or SE Ranking. Rightfully so – these SEO automation tools can help with market analysis, link building, keyword monitoring, and so much more.

But for someone who runs a small business or agency, the company budget likely won't cover high fees, let alone for more than one different tool. Because of it, companies tie themselves to a single platform, which may lack some features they need. 

As a result, SEO specialists either have to choose one or two tools – and lose out on specific functionalities other tools offer – or, even worse, do the tasks manually.

Also, there’s another option for those looking for various SEO tools for a bargain. You can find a lil’ shady SEO tools group-buy communities where multiple users share one account to save on quite expensive tools. However, this method won’t do for long-run campaigns as users with access to the account can delete the campaigns without a single notice. 

However, one simply can't manually do all the work and keep up with the ever-growing competition. That’s why SEO automation is a game-changer.

Plus, even if an SEO specialist has access to various SEO tools, that's often not enough. Yes, these tools help automate tasks, but they can't do it all. After all, the best SEO tool is your brain! 

Here's where custom-made SEO automation solutions like AI tools, scripts, simple web apps, and Google Advanced Search Operators come in, helping companies automate SEO tasks and save money.

6 Ways To Automate Mundane SEO Tasks 

If you’re into getting crafty, you can automate some tasks without needing third-party tools. Here we’ll talk about several solutions that can help increase automation and save time on manual tasks for free or at least without making you splash out big. 

1. Using advanced Google search operators 

A good place to start with SEO automation is to master Google's special commands that help to retrieve content and insights faster.

Say you want to analyze your main competitors' content output around a certain topic. It can help shed light on their content strategies and maybe even outrank them. You can see if they have incorporated topic clusters in their content. 

The advanced Google search operator "site:example.com keyword" can do a great job. This command triggers Google to search through the selected website (in this case, "example.com") for the chosen topic (in this case, "keyword").

Once the search usage is narrowed down, you can retrieve the data using our handy Google Search API with an amazing 100% success rate. Our API can help you avoid CAPTCHAs and get results without a single drop of sweat.

But this is just one example. Dozens of similar Google search operators can help speed up SEO tasks and be useful for site audits, page optimization, and other neat stuff. Check the table of all the available operators.

On their own, these operators are already helpful in performing some simple SEO tasks. But building them into scripts and web apps can help automate things even further and faster.

2. Building web applications or using a 3rd party tool

How the web app functions and what data it pulls is completely up to the master of code, aka  the programmer, who can create practically anything using commands.

Web apps like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider can crawl a website and find product details. Or go through Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) to collect data on keyword rankings. There’s also an effective (and free!) Search Analytics Sheets Chrome extension that helps to pick that valuable data effortlessly.

However, Google doesn’t like having its SERPs scraped. Plus, if Google notices that you’ve been checking rankings or tracking specific keywords too often, it may ban your IP address or flood you with CAPTCHA puzzles.

That’s the part where residential proxies come in handy. They rotate your IP address, and as the IPs come from real mobile and desktop devices, search engines treat them as usual visitors.

To get keyword data, companies typically go for an SEO automation tool like Ahrefs or a data scraper, such as SERP Scraping API. Building a detailed web application will be out of the scope for most small businesses. However, writing scripts and web scrapers to automate simple SEO tasks, luckily, doesn't have to be hard or time-intensive.

To get started, you need to decide on a programming or scripting language to use. Python is known as the best option for automating SEO and creating simple web apps.

3. Automation with Python for SEO audits

Python is defined as an open-source, interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics (sounds a lil’ complicated, right?). Summa summarum – it can be used for all sorts of functions, including rapid prototyping, connecting to database systems, and creating server-based web applications.

Python's syntax is considered straightforward compared to other programming languages, making it relatively easy to learn and build.

SEO experts can benefit from Python in several areas, including search and crawl data analysis, natural language processing (NLP), and SEO tool automation. One of the most common SEO routines is auditing a website to analyze each page for potential technical issues. With Python, a portion of this process can be automated easily. 

Take this Python SEO Analyzer script, for example. It allows the user to quickly analyze the site's structure and spot potential issues or opportunities by crawling it. The analyzer identifies broken links, missing markup, incorrect metadata, or similar technical problems in no time. The tool also counts the words on every page and analyzes common keyword usage on-site to highlight keyword stuffing or a lack of keyword usage on a page.

What’s cool, SEO masters can use this script on their competitors' websites and their own. From the number of blog posts and the average word count to keyword frequency inside an article – this script allows the user to analyze the competitor's content at scale. By examining several competitors within your niche,  you can benchmark their sites against the rest of the landscape and pinpoint where they’re located. Regularly performing content gap analysis is a vital part of SEO strategy, and automating it with scripts and simple web apps saves a lot of time-consuming manual work.

4. Automation with Python for image optimization

Although load time has been a Google ranking factor for quite a while, the introduction of Core Web Vitals has made it a crucial factor to show up in the SERPs. To optimize the web for a better user experience, Google now provides guidance on load time, visual stability, and overall tracking of how the user interacts with the site.

Unoptimized images are one of the prime causes of poor loading speed. Specialists at SEO agencies often come across clients with websites packed with thousands of large, unoptimized photos.

Going through the entire site to compress and optimize all of them can take hours. Luckily, a simple Python script can help automate this task.

This Python image optimization script can go through the entire image directory of a website and compress and optimize the images according to the programmer's guidelines. This fully automated way to optimize images can make one of the most mind-numbing tasks much easier. 

5. Automation with Python for link validation

As a website ages, new pages are created, old ones are deleted, and 301 redirects or 410 headers are put in place. Unfortunately, when multiple people (especially non-SEO experts) delete and add content to the site, links can get broken, causing 404 errors to pop up.

Poor link structure like that can harm a site's organic performance or cause temporary losses in traffic due to accidentally broken links.

For important pages, one might not notice the link is broken until they get an error report in Google Search Console – at which point damage has already been done. For less important pages, broken links might go undetected for months, harming a website's performance without anyone knowing.

This is where a Python script such as Pylinkvalidator can come in handy. The script automatically runs through an entire website to check the URL status code for each page. If a page is broken or a redirect is in place.

This automated way of checking for link issues saves time and can help detect them before they result in traffic loss.

6. Using AI assistants and SEO tools

SEO masters have been discovering the power of artificial intelligence tools for quite some time. Now we all know and widely use ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and other AI assistants mostly for research, but also for automation. The use of top AI SEO tools to speed up the process of website optimization is a prime illustration of this synergy. Usage example, a well-known ChatGPT combined with a community-curated AIPRM Chrome extension can generate unique SEO-related prompts in no time.

If you’re searching for a good content piece, just provide guidelines and keywords to Jasper.ai, which will create an error-free blog post within minutes. Still, you have to be cautious with this approach and always consider human curation in the process.

Additionally, content editors like SurferSEO, InLinks, SEMrush, together with Google’s Natural Language API, can help to target semantic elements in SEO briefs for your content peeps (just remember, querying this API does not always have to return full information about entities Google Search knows and uses in search results, their internal API most likely is about hundred or even thousand times larger graph).

But by learning how to combine all the AI-powered and SEO tools together, you’re ready to conquer the rankings. A dynamic toolkit can help you work more efficiently and still have control of all things SEO.

Conclusion

SEO automation might require quite a baggage of knowledge. Still, if you decide to put your mind and time into it, you can avoid those unpleasant SEO-related issues in the future.

Remember to automate everything you can, cause time is money! Combine Smartproxy’s SERP Scraping API and automated Python scripts,  to gather valuable data and top those rankings!

Please note. The original article was published by Dominick Hayes on the SERPmaster blog. Smartproxy acquired SERPmaster, and we've updated this article with our knowledge and information.