Collecting semantics, clustering, technical auditing, monitoring results and reporting in “manual” mode is very time-consuming. Automation will speed up this process and make it more efficient. Below we will tell in detail about each block of work and how it can be automated with the help of special tools.

Services for semantics gathering: fast and without garbage

Key.so.

A paid service that will help pull competitor data. There is a block “competitors of the site in search”. You choose the parameters you want, form a group report and get a set of keys.

What are the features of the service?

• You will get much more keywords than you would get by collecting them manually. For example, the manual search for the flooring industry yielded 700 keys, while the service returns 8,500.
• The parameter “key weight” allows you to choose the most topical keys, without trash.
• The built-in semantic kernel clustering works only by the soft method. Hard clustering can be done by uploading the keys to another clusterizer.

Who is good for whom?

Kes.so is good for information projects, for which the soft clustering is suitable. For commercial projects, it is recommended to use hard.

Serpstat

A close in functionality paid service for SEO and PPC specialists. It has a larger reference base than Keys.so, has a tool for expanding by the dictionary. But you have to pay for clustering separately. In Keys.so clustering is included in the tariff.

Ramazan Mindubaev, TRINET.Group: “I recommend using filters “thematicity” and “similarity” from 10 to 30 for analysis of competitors through Keys.so. The service also has the ability to filter sites by traffic.

Searchlab clusterizer

Searchlab clusterizer is a service of the Ashmanov and Partners search analytics laboratory for collecting broad semantics. It has long been successfully used by the company’s analysts to serve large projects.

What are the advantages of the service?

• The service has a built-in clustering engine with a choice of soft, hard or marker and LSI-analyzer.
• Free reclustering with other parameters is included.
• It is possible to load queries by list in the program’s field or upload a file with queries.
• Conducts collection of positions and relevant pages on Yandex, Google and Mail with the conclusion of the number of main pages in the top 30.
• For an additional fee it is possible to divide requests into informational and commercial, definition of the landing page, intents and topics.

SEO audit automation

NetpeakSpider or SEO Frog

To save time, pay attention to NetpeakSpider or SEO Frog.

How do services help?

• Parsing data.
• Identification of pages that require attention: no clicks, no hits, with a high bounce rate, no linking, etc.
• Collecting data to work with meta tags and texts.

For example, we need to find on the site of product cards with no price, or goods “out of stock. We open “Developer Tools” in the browser, copy XPath, paste it into the program NetpeakSpider and get all the URLs. Check where the data is missing, make recommendations: add a price, specify the availability, etc.

You can similarly pull data by URL from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and specify which services to use.

Ramazan Mindubaev, TRINET.Group: “NetpeakSpider has some features. For example, more accurate data than SEO Frog. Try it, choose what is more convenient for you personally.

Competitor Analysis

NetpeakChecker+ API.MegaIndex

Here you often need a summary analysis of indicators from different services. Solution: NetpeakChecker+ API.MegaIndex.

How does the service help?

• Evaluation of competitor strategies.
• Analysis of the age of domains to search for drops.
• Checking On-Page parameters to improve site SEO.
• Analysis of the link profile of your sites, as well as those of your competitors.
• Evaluation of the quality of sites for links.
• Integration with API.MegaIndex is done without involving the developer through Google Tables.

AHrefs

AHrefs is another paid service for analyzing competitors with rather high prices for the Russian market. The high cost is justified by the service’s broadest functionality. Here it is possible to unload by keywords, by links, and so on. These unloadings are convenient to upload to a free LinkStrategy and analyze the distribution: how the competitor’s site increased links during the month, what links were used, etc.

DigiMetr

As a free replacement you can use DigiMetr – a site service for mass inspection of sites for various parameters (indexing, SEO, traffic, etc.).

RDS-API

There is also a local program RDS-API, which allows you to use server resources for analysis of various SEO-parameters without the problem of parsing values, search engine bans, search proxies and other complications.

Text analysis

Key.so

The main task here is to identify important words for occurrences. A handy solution: use your competitors’ data. Keus.so, which we talked about a little bit above, can be used either to generate TK or to optimize the page.

What are the advantages?

• In Key.so, we open the desired URL and see all the keys on the page.
• Press the “competing pages” button, and see the competing URLs for the given keys.
• Use filters to select only thematic competitor pages.
• The “vocabulary” button will show the queries for which competitors are ranked, and the frequency.

If you already have a page with content, the “expand dictionary by page” button will check for occurrences that are ranked by competitors and are not on your page.

LSI-analyzer from Searchlab “Ashmanov and partners”

Searchlab’s LSI-analyzer collects vocabulary based on analysis of pages from the Top 10 or Top 30. Its advantage is the ability to perform LSI-analysis and evaluate whether the text is not overoptimized. The analyzer shows useful and superfluous content in the text, gives recommendations on how to add and remove lexical units. LSI analysis is included in standard Searchlab plans. It can be customized by search engine, depth, page type, region.

Outreach – work with external links

Link Building or Scrape Box

This is a relatively new direction in the promotion few people use because of the large labor costs in the search for sites and contact data. You can save your time with Link Building paid module in SemRush or free desktop program Scrape Box.

How does the service help?

You type in the keys, the tool analyzes and selects sites where you can potentially place a link. In this case, it immediately gets all the emails of sites.

Gmass

Finally, you’ll need Gmass, an online mailing list tool with no hidden copy to make emails look personal.

Search analytics

SEOWORK

Often large sites have lots of landing pages and it’s not clear which ones are worth doing, which ones aren’t. The solution: find the growth points to which you should put your efforts first.

The service Seowork with its enormous functionality (mainly the paid version) can help you with this. Here you can see many parameters: frequency, top, visibility, traffic growth potential for a given group of queries.

Ramazan Mindubaev, TRINET.Group: “You can use Seowork to mark groups or queries that you have worked on. For example, you may change titles, mark them, and then look at the dynamics of how this work affected the position of the site.

Pixel Tools

There is a service Pixel Tools, which is cheaper by 2 times. True, it has a less elaborate interface, but it is worth a try. Among the advantages – a comprehensive summary of the project, built-in checklists, automation of analytics and reporting, and many other features.

Monitoring

Traffic can decline for reasons independent of SEO. Some of the reasons arise more often due to the “human factor”: employees who affect the site directly (content managers, administrators, programmers). As a result of which the optimization is removed or the site is closed from indexation.

Uptime Robot

It is worth using Uptime Robot to notify about crashes or failures of the site. Up to 50 sites get free notifications by e-mail about technical problems. SMS-notifications can be connected for a fee.

Distill.io

There is a free Distill.io plugin for daily optimization checks. It can be installed and configured on any page, document, etc. There are free SMS and messenger notifications about optimization failures, there are paid features

Reporting

SEO-reports

Another area where automation greatly speeds up the process. Usually, 90% of the time it takes to manually copy the data when creating a report, which takes resources away from the analytics. In addition, there are no template solutions for a group of optimizers to use standard templates for reporting.

The solution could be a service where all the graphs with descriptions can be uploaded in 1 click and where there would be standardized wording. For 90% of this problem is solved by SEO-reports, which allows you to unload data from analytics counters by configuring the types of data to be unloaded. There is also a planning blog where you can enter standardized work.

In addition to this service Trinet Group has made its own interface, where you can divide the tasks into subtasks, add descriptive blocks, etc.

Task management and scheduling

Here above all there is a problem with a large number of typical tasks, as well as voluminous tasks with a large number of sub-tasks. How can we make sure that the optimizers do not lose important items? Plus it would be nice to design tasks in a standard corporate style. Trinet Group used standard templates in Bitrix24. With them, a manager can put a task to optimizers in one click with all the deadlines, checklists and descriptions.

When scheduling tasks, SEO companies are often faced with defocusing the executor’s attention between a large number of projects plus the lack of prioritization of tasks by Junior SEO specialists. On the part of the head of the department there is often a lack of understanding of the workload of employees and control tools.

Trinet Group used a standard solution – Google Charts – and implemented an improved Gantt chart. This allowed us to highlight all of the important tasks and form plans for the month with daily updates.

Conclusions

• Delegating technical work to services will free up working time for analysis and creative solutions.
• Most automation services are paid, free solutions are not available for all tasks. However, they have quite a flexible payment system and promo codes.
• There are not many tools for planning and reporting yet, but ready-made solutions come to the rescue.
• Automation is necessary for large companies with a large number of projects, where it is necessary to prioritize and work as a team.