As AI and automation become more important in SEO and PPC management, finding the right tools can help save you time and get better results for your business. From tracking performance to managing budgets, there are a number of tools available that small businesses can use.
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Benefits of SEO & PPC Automation
Time Saving
Automation of SEO & PPC tasks can be an obvious timesaver, especially when those tasks are tedious and time consuming. A long-winded task can seem less important when you have other jobs piling up. Instead, automating such tasks allows you to free up time to work on others that can’t be automated.
Money Saving
As the saying goes, “time is money”. And if you’re spending lots of time manually doing tasks that could be automated, it can feel as though income is draining through your fingers.
Although many of the below tools require a subscription, the cost-benefit can often be strongly in the tool’s favour. If a job that would usually take up hours of your time is suddenly reduced to a few minutes, then you can spend that newly-free time making an income, and probably quickly covering the cost of the tool.
Of course, always do your sums to find the right balance for your business.
Money Making
Sometimes, manually doing a task is so time-consuming that it never gets done. If that manual task is something that would make you money, though, automating it can mean an increase in profits.
Reduce Errors
We all make mistakes, so eliminating human error through automation can give you better results that you know you can rely on.
Access to More
If an SEO or PPC task is time-consuming or tedious, you might spend hours doing it, or you might not do it at all. That could mean you’re missing out on beneficial data analysis or budget management. Imagine running a Google Ad but never monitoring it because extracting the data takes too long. If you’re doing without the data, you can’t analyse performance and make improvements, which means you could be just throwing your budget away without suitable returns.
Through automation, by reducing the time required to do something, you’re more likely to take a look at that data and be able to adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
Reduce Stress and Confusion
When you’re a business owner, you’ve got a hundred and one things to think about, so trying to interpret confusing on-site dashboards, or searching for well-hidden information can be twice as difficult. Many automation tools not only make these processes quick and easy, they can present the data in a way that’s much more user-friendly. Instead of tables and lists of confusing numbers, you’re presented with visual charts that are much easier to understand.
PPC Automation Tools
Google Ads
Google Ads itself offers plenty of automated options that are well suited to beginners and intermediate users.
For example, in the auction scenario of Google Ads, automated bidding means that Google adjusts your bid on a search phrase based on how likely a user is to convert. This, in turn, can help you save money or reach more valuable users.
Other automations offered by Google Ads include the selection of best-performing assets (e.g. copy, images and calls-to-action), and creation of entire ads.
If you’re brand new to PPC automation, try Google Ads first. It’s free (apart from your ad spend) so a good place for smaller businesses to start.
Zapier
Zapier is a popular tool that can be used for all sorts of business automations. It’s no surprise, then, that it has some options for automating your Pay Per Click ads on Google, Microsoft and other advertising platforms.
Zapier’s most useful automation is probably its ability to feed data about leads and customers from other platforms into your ads account. The ads platform can then use that data to advertise to those users and/or to build similar audiences.
Remember to ensure you have proper consent set up when you’re using this kind of automation, so that you remain GDPR compliant.
Supermetrics
Create dashboards for all your marketing data so your most important information is easy to view and analyse. With Supermetrics, as well as tracking data from Google and Microsoft ads, you can also incorporate data from your social media sites. This gives you a broader view of how each marketing activity affects another. There are templates, too, making it even easier to get started.
SEO Automation Tools
SEMRush
SEMRush is perhaps the most popular and well known SEO tool currently available. That’s because it includes lots of automations that are incredibly useful for saving time and getting more from your SEO. Keyword research, rank tracking and competitor analysis are just some of the tools that are available.
Because of its popularity and usefulness, SEMRush does come with a price point to match, which might be out of reach for smaller businesses. However, there is also a free version with limited but still-useful features.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
With a generous free version, and an even more generous premium version, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a great tool for automation. The desktop application quickly crawls your entire website and gives you a wealth of data that will improve your SEO. The tool can rapidly tell you where your site is failing on SEO best practices, such as missing meta descriptions, and how user experience could be improved. This is particularly useful for larger websites where a manual review would be immensely time consuming.
SE Ranking
As the name suggests, SE Ranking uses automation to track how your website ranks in search, and how you can improve results. The tool also offers a number of other features, too.
A good ranking in search is the cornerstone of Search Engine Optimisation, which is why this particular tool is so useful. You can track chosen keywords to monitor performance and see how your site compares with competitors. To complement this, SE Ranking will also identify existing links to your site (backlinks), opportunities for new backlinks, and where you’ve lost links.
Bright Local
If you’re a local business (which means you sell to people in a relatively small geographic location), then local SEO should be an important part of your marketing strategy. With Bright Local, you can automate your local SEO with their citation building service. This means creating and updating external listings on sites like Yelp, Facebook, Google Business Manager, and hundreds more – all from one place. As well as building a strong backlink profile, this tool allows you to make sure all your listings hold the same information, therefore building trust and reliability.
Automation Tools for Both SEO and PPC
Looker Studio
Google’s own Looker Studio offers free reporting automation that integrates with Google Ads, Google Analytics and many other platforms both on and off Google. It is a central repository for all sorts of marketing data, allowing you to combine information from multiple platforms for an overarching view of marketing performance.
Though it can be a little glitchy, Looker Studio is free to use, so a great place to start if you’re new to report automation. Set up your report, either from scratch or by using one of the provided templates, and then you’re good to go.
Conclusion
With so many automation tools available, there’s no need for businesses to spend a huge number of hours on SEO and PPC tasks that can be done in a few minutes. Though this guide covers just a small number of available automation tools, they can help you analyse your data, run more cost-effective ads, and identify SEO improvements.