5 Ways Marketing Automation Boosts Your SEO

Automation is undoubtedly seen as a key component of many businesses. According to SMT’s 2019 State of Marketing Automation Survey Report, 75 percent of marketers said their businesses are already using automation tools.

Below are a few more statistics showing trends in marketing automation and its top benefits to businesses.

Must-Know Marketing Automation Trends

• In 2018, WEBITMD customers who combined marketing automation with SEO increased their leads by more than 68 percent in just six months
• Social Media Today found out that the top processes deemed most suitable for automation are social media post scheduling, email marketing, social media advertising, messaging/chatbots and sales prospecting/alerts

Image source: https://www.emailmonday.com/marketing-automation-statistics-overview/

• According to Ascend2’s 2019 Marketing Technology Utilization Survey, marketing influencers find marketing automation/email/CRM the most effective MarTech type (53 percent), followed by marketing data/dashboard/analytics (43 percent).
• Meanwhile, the following MarTech topped the list of the most difficult tools: optimization/personalization/testing (50 percent), experience/relationship marketing (40 percent), and marketing/data/dashboard/analytics (39 percent).

Image source: https://www.emailmonday.com/marketing-automation-statistics-overview/

• – B2B marketing businesses included in Smart Insights and Communicator’s Managing B2B Marketing Automation in 2019 study felt that the most important benefits of marketing automation are improved user experience and communications relevance (60 percent), lead qualifying (59 percent), generating more leads (57 percent), and improved conversion rates (52 percent)

Image Source: https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/state-of-b2b-marketing-automation-2019/

While many still see automation as more appropriate for social media, email marketing, and CRM, automated SEO tools are fast becoming indispensable to marketers who want to level up their organic search rankings. Aside from taking on mundane SEO tasks, these technologies are helping marketers improve their campaigns. Meanwhile, marketing automation tools are helping brands maintain an active presence in multiple channels, thus complementing or even boosting organic SEO.

Here’s how marketing automation can bring your company’s SEO strategy to a whole new level.

1. Automate SEO Tasks

While SEO is undeniably critical to any business, it involves a lot of repetitive tasks. The tedious aspects of SEO consume precious human resources and time, which may be better used for analysis and other tasks that cannot be taken on by automation tools. 

There are several SEO tasks that you can easily automate to help your team improve SEO strategies or quickly spot and resolve issues. Some examples include:

• SEO optimization: Technology like BrightEdge Autopilot can now fix orphan pages and duplicate content and optimize mobile pages
• Link building: You can install the Chrome extension Hunter.io to predict email addresses and have an outreach mailing list in no time and leverage email segmentation tools to automatically follow-up those who have not opened or responded to your email
• Finding Keywords: Another Chrome extension you can install is Keywords Everywhere which allows you to see keyword CPCs and search volume and discover related keywords right within your search results page

• SEO Audits: Instead of manually checking every page of your website for issues, you can use tools to crawl your site and generate reports on broken internal links, redirects, and metadata when the reports are ready you and your team can come in to fix these
• Monitor Keyword Ranking: It can be tedious to regularly monitor your search engine ranking for each keyword in your target location,  but there are tools that offer position tracking specifically for your priority keywords which also compare your ranking with those of your online competitors.

2. Hyper-Personalize Your Content

Today’s users and buyers are drowning in too much content, so it’s no longer enough to simply top the search results. Once a user clicks on your company’s link, you need to be able to quickly capture their interest so you can convert them into subscribers or better yet, into buyers. 

One way to do this is to personalize content based on their needs or preferences, and where they are in the buyer’s journey. And marketing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can definitely boost your company’s SEO and personalization strategies. Here are a few examples.

Tailored recommendations: Starbucks leverages its customer database to send personalized menu suggestions. Meanwhile, Marketo’s Content AI allows you to give your site visitors customized content recommendations. This way, people who find you on search results can spend more time on your site, browse related materials, and get to know your products or services better. 

Chatbots can serve up these recommendations too. Here’s one example by Smart Insights.

Providing relevant content suggestion can help them advance faster in their customer journey. Since today’s consumers often do their own research before making a purchase, you can use customized content to help them in their research while keeping your brand top-of-mind. 

Dynamic content: You can use marketing automation to hyper-personalize the content you provide to users. Similar to inserting their names in emails and subject lines, you can incorporate their company name in a document they are about to download. You can even customize quotes and images based on when users request or download these. 

Segmented content distribution: As much as possible, you want to retain visitors, especially qualified leads, who found you through organic searches and paid ads. One way to retain them is to create tailored email campaigns. By segmenting your email list, you can include subscribers in drip campaigns based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. You can even set triggered emails for abandoned cart and for previous customers.

3. Qualify Leads with Ease

Automation tools make it easy for marketing and sales teams to identify which leads are ready to buy your product or service. Predictive lead scoring uses several variables, including demographics, behavioral data, and urgency, to assign a score to each lead. With these tools, your sales team can prioritize qualified leads that are almost ready to buy from you as well as those who make up your ideal clients.

4. Systematize Social Media Marketing

You may be wondering what social media has to do with SEO. The answer is: A lot.

Neil Patel points out that Bing’s search results algorithm includes social signals. Additionally, Google search results also serve business’s social media profiles. For example, National Geographic’s Twitter and Facebook accounts showed up in Google search results for “National Geographic.”

More and more, customers are using social media accounts to search companies and content, or even check a business’s customer reviews before availing of their services. They can simply type in your company name or a keyword in the platform’s search bar or find you through relevant hashtags and social shares. 

As one of the many marketing tasks businesses opt to automate, there’s a lot you can do with social media marketing tools. You can: 

Track social mentions: You can get notifications whenever your business or name is indicated or referenced.

Brainstorm headlines: Tools like CoSchedule have a Headline Analyzer feature to help you create multiple versions of your headlines. This way, readers don’t feel like they’re getting bombarded with repetitive shares.

Schedule your posts: For social media content to get more attention, you need to know the best hours or days for posting. At the same time, you need to share enough content to keep your brand top of mind without coming across as spammy.

Automation tools can get these tasks off your plate. You can use them to create a schedule for each social media channel, then start queuing up posts for each. 

If you want to increase your Instagram followers, you want to make sure you are posting photos and videos during high-traffic hours.

5. Automate SEO Analytics

Today’s automation tools are moving beyond data gathering data–they are now helping marketers make sense of all the information. For example, Apollo Insights can do content gap analysis and conversions reviews.

Tracking Marketing Automation Results

As with any strategy, you need to track if your automation is producing the results you want. This way, you can duplicate or expand what works and tweak or stop those that do not contribute to your business goals.

For example, you can use social media automation tools to identify your best-performing posts and re-add these to your queues in the future. 

While you may be doing well on some keywords, you may want to start tracking new keywords with strong user intent, so you can keep your business on top of search results.

In terms of hyper-personalization, you need to monitor which of these techniques are actually increasing your conversions and double down on those.

Takeaway

Some fear that automation and AI will take away the human touch in marketing. But in many ways, these tools are freeing up marketers’ time and resources so they can focus on tasks where human ingenuity is needed most–things like overseeing SEO strategies, developing new campaigns, creating content that better addresses user intent, and using data to improve SEO traffic.

What are some marketing tasks you’re hesitant to automate? What automation tools are you eyeing to prioritize to boost your search ranking this 2020? 

Don’t let your company be left out in the SEO game. Leverage the automation tools at your disposal, so you can generate better results in less time.