  BIO: Chris McDonald is a UK freelancer for Webris, specialising in content marketing. Secretly, he plays rugby for England in his dreams! (It’s good to have goals, right?) He’s passionate about the power of the written word, but when not tapping away at the keyboard, he loves all things health & wellness, advocating to be kind and thoughtful of others. Before we get stuck into the argument of whether you should automate your SEO or not, let’s be clear on something… … manualizing the entirety of your SEO just isn’t feasible. So, when going through the pros and cons of both, keep in mind that a lot of the manual SEO is in relation to things like guest posting & link building. Even so, you may need to strike a balance between the two. Ready? Let’s go… A focus on the key differences between manual and automated SEOLet’s start with the automationAutomated SEO comes largely in the form of tools, whether that’s standalone tools:
and SEO WordPress plugins, like:
Sure, there are more than these, but let’s be honest about them being pretty kick-ass. I’ve used all four of the above and they all nail their jobs really well. On top of this, you’ll also find some contact information scrapers, like Hunter.io. This is where I draw the line, and you’ll see exactly why in a bit! And manual SEO?Since SEO is such an all-encompassing term, taking a manual SEO approach will still need to focus on some tools, such as:
But, there’s a slight twist here. Instead of heavily relying on the data extracted from Ahrefs, Semrush, GA & GSC, you could export them into your own spreadsheet and develop your own database and tracking system. PS. Don’t forget that the main contender for manual SEO is completely avoiding any form of automated outreach.  Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay The argument for automated SEO In a world where we seem forced to strive for synergies and efficiencies, automated SEO definitely has a huge gravitational pull. And it’s entirely understandable to default down that path. But, I still feel you should arm yourself with both the pros and cons of using software… Benefits of using SEO automation Speed, time and money saving wombo-comboI can’t imagine what SEO was like before you could get a list of thousands of relevant keywords within seconds. Image the blood, sweat and tears that would’ve gone into that! With the speed of our current SEO tools, this leads to a time-saving, which also means there's less of an opportunity cost to you and your business. Will deliver business-wide results fasterEverything scales faster with automation, fueling the fire of the business engine. You can then spend more time on bottlenecks in other parts of your enterprise, pushing and pulling resources around as you need. The result? Scaling-up your business faster than expected. Less of a need to outsource your SEOPreviously, being an “SEO specialist” was such a niche skill with high demand and low supply that most of you would’ve outsourced your SEO needs in a heartbeat. Now, having an in-house SEO specialist is a lot easier thanks to the automation that tools bring us. While that person still needs their head screwed on, it’s a lot easier to “learn SEO” than ever. Excellent for planning and schedulingMany SEO tools have built-in scheduling options, enabling you to run the following processes as and when needed:
This further streamlines your project management, aligning tasks in sequence to deliver business and client results. Gone are the days of having to plan your day around researching SEO when you can just hit the button and go off and multitask! (Yes, I’m a guy, and yes, we find multitasking hard!) Perfect for peer review and gap analysisSomething I love about SEO automation is that it opens up the world to analyze your competition, especially in the form of keyword gap analysis. Both Ahrefs and Semrush do this very well, but in Ahrefs, simply hit the “Content gap” link in the “Site Explorer” section:  Then add in the URLs that you want to analyze to see which keywords they rank for that you don’t:  It’ll then churn out a bunch of keywords for you to analyze further. Tip: Starting with a keyword all of your targets are ranking for is a good place to start  Automated SEO isn’t all unicorns and rainbows… here’s why  Might create a bad repIn terms of automated outreach, especially, spamming a site with a generic message can really annoy someone, to say the least. The reason I’m writing this very article is because I reached out to Cheryl here at Ginger Marketing. And I made damn sure to read her requirements, more specifically this one:  By sending the ill-advised and generic “Can I send you some topic ideas”, Cheryl specifically asks for you to send one. Doing the opposite is a big NO-NO (a bit like putting jam on a scone first), and will mean your message is highly likely to be ignored. You can still use automated outreach, but you’ll find yourself tweaking a draft email every single time, which erodes the time efficiency the automation brings. Likely to incur Google penaltiesGoing in like Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball and getting links to any site that exists won’t do yourself any favors. We know that toxic backlinks are definitely a thing, and by reaching out to every site and their dog with your eyes shut will land you in hot water. It kinda makes sense when you think about it… why would Google give your site any love if you have one of these super dodgy sites linking to you:
And by using a completely automated outreach approach means you won’t necessarily filter them out. That said, there’s an argument for using something like Guest Bloggers Wanted, which you should totally check out. Learning barrier with some automation toolsI LOVE software. Not in a weird way, just that I find them to be logical. But even so, be aware that you may need to invest some time and expect process destabilization while you get used to some SEO tools. For example, I find Semrush to be quite jumbled and confusing, whereas Ahrefs seems more logically laid out. Coupled with this, you should marry your chosen SEO software to your responsible person’s skills. Just because Ahrefs seems to be more popular, that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you…  Outsourcing might still be a necessity Depending on what your business does, it doesn’t really make sense to hire an SEO specialist if you’re not in the SEO space consistently each day. That said, you should still have someone responsible for SEO, such as a marketing manager, but outsource your SEO work to an expert(s). This kind of defunks the need for you to do any SEO automation and to commit to a hefty (depending on your budget) monthly subscription. But I know that some outfits do still buy up all the tools because they like the bells and whistles, but still outsource the main SEO labor. If SEO isn’t your business’ core competence, should you really be doing it? All about manual SEO  Image by Лариса Мозговая from Pixabay To reiterate, I’m not talking about sitting there with a quill and ink, crawling through a website, writing down every word that it contains, then manually adding up how often each one is used to determine the “keywords”. I’m not that insane. Manual SEO is more about using some manual approaches to make your SEO even better. Reasons to consider manual SEONo data/token/report restrictionsSomething I find really frustrating is that, depending on your subscription plan, SEO tools still restrict you with things like:
So, what you can do, especially if there isn’t a huge amount of data to go through, is manually record them in a spreadsheet so you don’t use up your daily, weekly or monthly quota without needing to. I’ve even found that this is quicker, especially if you only need to grab a couple of low-competition long tail keywords that a competitor is ranking for. Going through the rigmarole of exporting the data, removing unnecessary columns and rows, copy and pasting it into your main spreadsheet, re-sorting and then refreshing pivot tables or running macros isn’t always necessary! The power of human contactWhich of the below do you think is going to work better for outreach… Someone using automated SEO to grab any old backlink going:  For starters, using automatic outreach tools leaves you open to making mistakes, such as not completely the {First Name} field. Also, the majority of sites that accept guest posts guide you on exactly what to do, so asking to send over some topics doesn’t always float. More importantly, there is zero personal approach in that email. While you may think that “I’ve just been through your site and I love it” is a personal approach, it really isn’t. Instead, something like this works much better:  I’ve highlighted the personalisation, but actually the whole email is full of it! And yes, I have been to Edinburgh and liked Princes Street, but I’m sure you can find a way of personalising every manual outreach email you send. More control over SEOWith the manual outreach approach in mind, you can completely pick and choose the:
All the above gives you total control over this side to your SEO roadmap. In addition, and this is a severely underrated aspect, networking via this manual approach could lead to further work and “SEO juice” between your two sites, for a long time to come. Backup in case automation failsWhile this isn’t a regular occurrence, sometimes having a manual database of keywords, for example, can save you in a pinch when you can’t log in to our chosen SEO tool. A classic case of this is when you have shared access to Ahrefs and more than one user is logged in, booting the other person out. This can slow you down, but the worst thing is when you can’t get in at all. Having saved reports within the software that you can’t access is nothing short of frustrating. And the same can happen with something like SiteBulb. It’s an exceptional piece of kit, but I love that you can export ALL the data and analyze it further when needed. Why you should avoid manual SEO Like wading through mud  Image by hamperium from Pixabay Imagine taking your SEO 100% manual. You’d been doing it forever! Even a simple task like asking Google to index your new page would be painstakingly slow. And that’s even on a small blog. What if you were to build your dream monster site and pump out a few pieces of content a day? Good luck with that! Even manual outreach is considerably slower than automating it. Restrict business growth Essentially, the more time it takes you to do something, the slower you’ll see results. Caveat: As long as you could’ve generated the same result in a faster method. Not using SEO software’s in-built gap analysis, for example, means you’d have to:
Whereas a decent piece of SEO software will do all of the above at the click of a button. The time taken in the manual approach essentially means a greater opportunity cost to other areas of your business/site/blog. Combine this one small example with a manual approach to other SEO practices, and you’ll definitely stunt your growth. Staff buy-inExpect a heavy amount of resistance! Asking your team to carry out manual processes when they know it can be done more quickly and simply through automation is going to be a rough gig. While you may eventually make them see the light, it won’t be an easy negotiating process. It’s actually more costlyAutomated SEO will bring economies of scale to your enterprise i.e. saving the time cost of manual processes to increase your team’s output. The sheer amount of effort involved in doing things manually may save you a three-or-four-figure monthly saving in not subscribing to an SEO tool. BUT, the time it will take your awesome team of humans to do the same is so far removed that they might as well be on the moon! Do I really have to tell you which is better?Now, you might think I’m going to scream, “AUTOMATE ALL YOUR SEO”, but I actually believe in a combination of the two. And, actually, if you’re a very casual blogger, going manual isn’t so much of a rough deal. But, even if you’re looking to write one post a week that needs some SEO attention, automation is going to be vital. The pure time-saving and removing the need for expertise will have serious knock-on benefits. So, my advice is:
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  BIO: Stephanie Trovato fills her days with content creation and marketing strategy for publications like Business Insider, Investopedia, Huffington Post, and more. She also works marketing strategy as a freelancer with Optimist, while balancing duties as a DotDash editor. She is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and is based in New York. Check out more of her work at BigHContent.com. There’s no doubt that marketing today is the epitome of multitasking. It's all about big data, and functions that advertisers used to do manually are now inextricably linked with automation. Marketing automation is a system that streamlines and automates marketing procedures to make marketing practices easier. Marketing technology offers a lot: more leads, transactions, and sales, and all with less effort. In fact, according to CMO, businesses that employ automation have seen a rise in leads and revenue, resulting in a 14% increase in sales efficiency and a 12% decrease in marketing overheads. Automation represents an incredible prospect for increased productivity, cost savings, and a better consumer experience for marketing practitioners. It can seem daunting to embark on an automation journey for your company, but with the right guidance, it is simpler than you expect! Benefits of Marketing Automation Marketing automation tech allows you to do so more than just place orders for your various promotions. It has real advantages for a marketing firm, not just for you and your marketing campaigns, but also for your customers. Here are the top three primary benefits of marketing automation tools: 1. Saving Time and Raising Efficiency The term "automation" is self-explanatory. Marketing automation software automates processes that used to take days and completes them in hours or even minutes. For example, social media management systems allow advertisers to plan and publish posts across several social networks simultaneously. This gives advertisers greater freedom in all marketing firms and agencies, allowing them to focus on their creativity rather than waste resources on repetitive activities. A strategy like this boosts production and performance. 2. Less Routine, Happier Marketers Marketing workers should assign the most routine and time-consuming functions to intelligent algorithms, ensuring well-established procedures while unleashing their imagination. As a result, the staff is happy, consumers are delighted, and revenue is high. 3. Multiple Channels to Drive More Leads and Sales Marketing automation software allows you to meet consumers at various stages of the consumer experience across various platforms. Multi-channel targeting gives you options: you could send an email or a social media post, make phone calls, or tweet in a tailored manner. You could utilize a broad range of techniques deftly, like a real sorcerer.  5 Ways Automation To Advance Their Marketing Strategy As per recent data published on the Digital Marketing Institute, 44 percent of marketing leaders think automation will become more relevant as a capability in 2020, which can be considered when reskilling workers and recruiting new employees in 2019. Here are few ideas for incorporating it into your business strategy: 1. Content Marketing Automation The aims of the modern marketer are timeless: build new ways to increase profits while keeping current buyers satisfied and returning for more. And content management is a huge part of that. When you have valid, accurate, informative, and actionable knowledge, you are using a tried-and-true strategy for meeting your clients, not to mention achieving your marketing objectives. Attempting to do it all manually, on the other hand, is a complex challenge that can quickly keep you awake at night. Marketing automation can make it easier to build and monitor content across several platforms. It will provide the appropriate content to each customer, ensuring that your efforts are not lost and that connections are effectively nurtured. An effective marketing automation framework will also report on how the content is doing across all channels and in all situations. Moreover, marketing automation can help you create good quality content that enables you to showcase your personality. As there’s no doubt that content is the king of marketing and will remain so for a long time, there have been commendable advancements in the field of content creation, processing, and planning—for example, a headless CMS. A headless CMS is based on a modular model that separates content development, management, and publication from how it is presented. This allows marketing teams to push fresh content and IT teams to make new technical changes without having to call on each other for assistance or worry about breaking something. Not only does this increase efficiency, but it also speeds up the process and workflow.  2. Email Marketing Solutions Email marketing encompasses so many facets of brand-customer engagement that it is rightly regarded as one of the most common marketing platforms. Furthermore, it remains one of the most successful ways to meet your target demographic. By using this form of marketing, almost every company across multiple industries can automate and personalize communications sent to new and current customers. Most notably, such tools allow large-scale email marketing campaigns with a large number of recipients. Email marketing program dashboards typically have comprehensive campaign information. 3. Social Media Marketing (SMM) Solutions Companies are also using social media to exchange news with consumers, solicit feedback, and even create leads. It's not shocking, given social media's enormous capacity for brand promotion and corporate identity management. Social media marketing software is ideal for organizing posts, engaging new contacts, and assessing the effectiveness of the SMM campaigns. Moreover, by organizing your posts and using automation to understand trends, you’re more likely to create a viral post. 4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions Customer data management is an extremely critical but routine activity that takes a long time and demands complete focus. Another aspect to consider: how you capture and retain consumer data has a significant effect on the customer service the customers ultimately get. The authenticity of the information, prompt responses to customers, contact history, and knowledge about past contacts are all critical for your appearance and credibility and for converting leads into opportunities and prospects into clients. CRM technologies allow sales and marketing departments to simplify these critical elements, ensuring that the business is still seen in the best possible light in the minds of your consumers. 5. Marketing Analytics & Reporting Solutions Marketing automation systems provide a variety of valuable knowledge in and of themselves. However, from this vantage point, one category stands out in particular. There are marketing solutions designed to monitor campaigns and provide detailed metrics. User behavior analysis, dashboards of different types of metrics, illustrative graphs, and reports — marketing monitoring and monitoring systems help companies determine which campaigns are effective and which are not. Analytical marketing techniques can be specialized, such as website traffic analytics solutions, or they can provide advertisers with a comprehensive view of all campaigns. 4 Key Steps Towards Automation It is critical to create a workflow before introducing digital marketing systems. This enables the staff to prepare for future processes while still ensuring that automation produces the best outcomes for your brand. There are four major moves to take:  1. Identify The Right Tasks Look for the team's most popular marketing activities. This is where you'll see the most benefits from automation. As previously said, simple automatic response emails, for instance, will significantly minimize the team's logistical workload. Make a list of all of the latest marketing tasks and choose both time-consuming and automatable ones. 2. Select The Appropriate Automation Software When it refers to automation applications, there are almost limitless options. Sorting out the right ones can be difficult, particularly when you're just starting out. We'll guide you to the cream of the crop later in this post, and it's also important to note that applications customized to your industry can exist. Expand the study to ensure this before making a long-term commitment. Most platforms have a free trial period, allowing you to try the app in your own environment and determine which is the right match. 3. Train Your Team While automation improves marketing efficiency instantly, the implementation of modern technologies and processes necessitates an investment in preparation for relevant workers. Team members must understand how technology blends into their workday and how their job can be refocused. Emphasize the incentives and allow employees to carefully assess new systems while acknowledging any questions they might have. Marketing automation is expected to become one of the most relevant marketing capabilities, and companies are investing accordingly now and in the coming future. 4. Evaluate Automation Effectiveness Putting automation in place is not the end of the story. We suggest doing a regular assessment of what is going well, what could be changed, and the effect of automation on key indicators. This allows you to make the required modifications at the proper time. Conclusion Automation has a lot of potential benefits. Greater performance, cost savings, increased effectiveness, more informative analytic results, and enhanced customer service are all appealing to marketing professionals. Almost every company can incorporate and create a successful marketing automation strategy within their organization by undertaking proper preparation, clear priorities, and advanced training. This can help companies reap the plethora of benefits of marketing automation and take their enterprise to the next level.   Last Updated 07/05/2021 Today I have a a technical post for you. Not technical in the sense that you need any technical skills though - queue sighs of relief. I’m going to break down how to fix your broken links & 404 errors without needing any technical skills at all. And I'm also going to explain how to set up a custom weebly 404 page, so, should you have broken links on your website, your users will be directed to a custom 404 instead of a generic page. YAAY. Before I begin, this post applies to Weebly Users. My website is hosted & built through Weebly so I will base the post off this platform. Having said that, the first half of this post will be relevant if you use Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix or any other platform so if you are not sure what a 404 error is it is still worth reading. This post covers: What Are Broken Links & 404 Errors? Why Broken Links & Weebly 404 Errors Important To Fix How To Identify Broken Links & 404 Errors On Your Website How To Fix Broken Links & 404 Errors In Weebly How To Set Up A Custom Weebly 404 Page What Are Broken Links & 404 Errors?Very simply this is any link that a user might follow on your website which takes them to a 404 error page instead of the page they were looking for. This will happen anytime you update or optimise a url. For example, say this post about getting a hobby was live on your website: OLD URL: http://tinybuddha.com/blog/hobby-can-boost-motivation-change-life/ It’s doing really well and you are getting traffic and shares. But, you do some keyword research and notice that the URL could be optimized to improve its ranking position. So, you update the url to: NEW URL: http://tinybuddha.com/blog/boost-motivation-with-hobby/ What you’ve done is created a new url, and the old url now goes to a 404 page (unless you have an automatic redirect set up, some wordpress sites do). Anywhere on your website where you have linked to the old url, and anyone else who linked to your old url, all of those links now go to a 404 error page. (The image below shows the generic Weebly 404 error page which you would get on a weebly website if you follow a broken link.)  To check your 404 error page type your url into your browser and add some random letters at the end of it. For example: http://tinybuddha.com/kkkddd  Top Tip: You can also optimise your 404’s like Tiny Buddha have done here. By simply placing links through to important or popular content you will decrease the number of users who leave your website from a 404 page. There are tons of ways you can optimize the page and I have included some at the bottom of this post where we cover: How To Set Up A Custom Weebly 404 Error Page Why Broken Links & Weebly 404 Errors Are Important To FixThere are a few reasons why fixing your broken links is important. Firstly user experience. It is very annoying, especially if your visitor is on a mobile, to click through to content & find a 404 page. Short attention spans mean you don’t have a margin for error with your visitors. Most will just leave your site and may never come back. That’s a lot of wasted energy which has gone into getting that visitor to your site only to have them leave again. Another reason is for SEO purposes. Say your post had been referenced by several other websites, perhaps it has been shared hundreds, maybe even thousands of times (we can dream). If you don’t fix your broken links then all of this link equity stays with the old url and you’ve lost valuable positive SEO signals pointing to your website. Redirecting your old URL to your new URL means that most of this link juice will flow through to your new page. This is great for your offpage SEO. How To Identify Broken Links & 404 Errors On My Site?Identifying broken links is SUPER EASY thanks to Google and their tool Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t signed up already then get your profile. It’s very easy to install and there is a tutorial here for you to follow. It might take Google a week or so to crawl your website and populate the data. But once it is populated navigate to the section; Crawl Errors  This will let you know where your broken links are! Perfect. How To Fix Broken Links & 404 Errors In WeeblyOnce you have identified your broken links, navigate to your Weebly Website Dashboard. Select “Edit Site”. And now hit “Settings” In The Top Navigation  Click The SEO Tab and scroll down to the redirect section. Here you can enter your old url and select the new page you want visitors to go to.  Top Tip: For deleted pages if there is a closely related page send users there. If there is no closely related page send users to your homepage, or consider re-writing the page! I hope this post has inspired you to fix your broken links on Weebly. It might not be the most fun task in the world, but improving your visitors experience is. So, check in every few months and make sure you aren’t frustrating your readers and losing valuable SEO juice in the process. If you want to go one step further and create a customer weebly 404 page, then check below. How To Set Up A Custom Weebly 404 PageWeebly's 404 error page is very basic, it has to apply to lots of different websites across a huge range of industries and brands so that makes sense. It does include a link through to your homepage to encourage visitors to click through and see if they can find what they are looking for, but it can be improved. A custom 404 page is also one of the indicators for Google that tells them your site is high quality. I'm not saying that by adding a custom 404 page suddenly your site will be prioritized and you'll see your ranks increase. However, putting that little bit of extra effort into your content is a good habit to get in to! It only takes a few minutes and you can have a custom 404 page which elevates the perception of your blog, website and / or business. To create a custom weebly 404 page Go to: Edit Site Click: New Page Name this page: 404 Tick: Hide In Navigation  Now you can create whatever you like! And you can get really creative. Here are some of my favorite examples of 404 error pages for inspiration (note, these were not all created on Weebly).    Ebay 404 Error Page - good for function!
As you can see there are lots of ways you can go with this page. The perfect page is one that stays on brand but still helps the user gets to where they want to go. So make sure you have a link through to your homepage, or even better your site categories to help your visitor easily find what they are looking for. That's it for this post! I hope this is a great reference for you. Good luck on your blogging journey and feel free to comment below or contact me and say hi. |
AuthorWritten by Cheryl A Clarke Chief Happiness Officer & Content Marketing Freelancer @ Ginger Marketing (unless stated otherwise) Blog CategoriesMost Popular ContentTotal Social Media Share Count
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“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI