According to research, only 0.78% of Google searchers click on results from the 2nd page, while the #1 result on Google has a CTR of 31.7%. Climbing up on Google’s top search results is a priority goal for business owners and marketing teams. Companies can’t achieve that goal without a well-designed marketing strategy combined with a tremendous amount of time and effort-consuming work. Such valuable resources can be saved and redirected to focus on other high-level digital marketing tasks.
If you’re questioning yourself, can digital marketing be automated? The answer is yes, it can, and this article will introduce the concept of digital marketing automation, where it can be used, and the 5 best marketing automation tools.
Table of Contents
What is digital marketing automation?
As the name suggests, digital marketing automation is all about utilizing dedicated software solutions to automate data collection, analysis, monitoring, reporting, and feedback. It reduces administrative work and allows more time to focus on strategic marketing planning that requires human interaction.
What digital marketing tasks can I automate?
Although full digital marketing automation is impossible, some long, tedious, yet complicated marketing tasks can be automated. When companies introduce automation in digital marketing, it helps professionals concentrate on marketing campaigns comprehensively. The most common tasks that can be automated are:
1. Site monitoring
Websites are the headquarters of marketing and sales operations; therefore, it’s essential to watch their performance closely. It includes numerous components to monitor each day, e.g., broken links, page loading time, etc. SEO automation tools can do these tasks regularly and efficiently. For example, performing daily checks, collecting data, and reporting potential risks and available fixes.
If you are running an SEO campaign for your company and want to get the best results, you need to monitor your site performance regularly for possible improvements. Handling this task manually requires the team responsible for SEO to devote more time and effort, but what if your company simultaneously launches separate campaigns for multiple projects? Automating SEO becomes a must to keep track of everything.
2. Keyword rank tracking
Keywords are the cornerstone of successful SEO strategies, and when targeted correctly, they function as the website’s organic rank booster. Therefore, keyword rank tracking is essential to keep up with SEO competition. With millions of competitors in each industry worldwide, it’s pretty impossible to track ranking keywords manually.
SEO automation tools can research your website’s target keywords and your competitors. In addition to analyzing online user search behavior. These tools can automate the whole research process and generate automated SEO reports instantaneously.
3. Backlink analysis
Backlinks are a significant part of every SEO campaign, the more valuable backlinks a website has, the more authority and trust it gets, subsequently going up on SERP. You may have hundreds or thousands of backlinks and keeping those links workable and checking them daily is a time-consuming high priority. Automating this task will save a lot of time and get it done in seconds!
To keep your backlink profile clean, you need to regularly monitor and analyze backlinks pointing to your website pages. In other words, it is essential to know the sources of backlinks and anchor texts and where those backlinks point to.
Automating this task with professional tools can save your time and help you get a detailed analysis of your backlink profile, including backlink sources, link destination, anchor scripts, backlink status (unfollow/follow), and much more.
4. Competitor monitoring
Keeping a close eye on competitors is vital, especially in the digital online market. But when you have countless online competitors, it becomes harder to keep up with every one of them. Digital marketing automation enables monitoring competitors’ websites and campaigns to outpace them.
It will provide detailed information about their marketing campaigns and SEO practices. Using such information properly helps beat competitors on SERP and prevents them from outranking the company.
5 best marketing automation tools
Any digital marketing automation platform has emerged to replace manual data collection and analysis, making the work of digital marketers more efficient. Finding the right marketing campaign automation tools is the most critical step. These tools are task-focused, and knowing your goals is important to get the most of them. Here are some tools you can start with:
1. Screaming Frog
One of the first SEO automation tools to appear on the market. Screaming Frog is a search engine marketing company; they have developed a powerful SEO automation tool called “SEO Spider.” Spider’s objective is to help clients automate website monitoring.
It crawls through the site, finds every page, extracts valuable data, and presents it in the form of automated SEO reports that lists various problems with the site’s structure, such as broken links, missing meta tags, redirects, and many more. In addition, it can be integrated with other tools such as Google Analytics.
The tool does not include the feature of analyzing advertisements on search engines. With its old-fashioned interface and expert reports, it may seem overwhelming to beginners, but many professionals consider it a reference in the field of website structure checking. Screaming frog spider helps in:
- Find and identify broken links
- Analyze metadata & page titles
- Identify duplicate content
- Sitemap generation
- Review redirects
- Audit meta robots & directives
- Export SEO reports to spreadsheets automatically
Screaming Frog is free for up to 500 pages, and more importantly, it can be scheduled to save time for other SEO tasks.
2. SE Ranking
Any SEO strategy relies on data collection and analysis as a fundamental procedure to get the best results. This digital marketing automation platform saves the SEO and marketing teams many hours of work. It allows users to automate keyword research, enables flexible and automatic reporting, and provides the possibility to create a custom template for reports.
SE Ranking is a powerful SEO tool that allows users to monitor the performance of keywords, competitors, backlinks, and traffic. It provides reliable data about:
- Technical errors
- Meta tags and headers
- Website load speed
- Internal links
- Images
It’s a comprehensive multi-task SEO automation tool that helps in various activities:
- Automate backlink monitoring
- Automate keyword research
- Automate monitoring rankings
- Website analysis
- Provide competitor’s strategies insights
SE Ranking helps save quality time and provides valuable data to boost SEO strategy and optimize ranking on Google search pages.
3. Hotjar
Hotjar is a digital marketing automation tool that helps increase conversion rates and make the user experience more intuitive. It helps discover the places visitors click on, and the time they spend on each page. Hotjar also helps track the user’s journey within the site to improve CTA placements. It allows users to create questionnaires and submit them to site visitors.
Hotjar is specialized in providing insights about users’ behavior to help understand them better. It offers many features to assist in the following:
- Provides visual tracking of users’ behavior on target websites through heat-maps and recordings features
- On-page surveys and feedback to better understand users’ behavior and improve their UX
- Offers fast product insights with no need for analysis expertise
These features will help increase the conversion rates and boost sales.
4. Yoast SEO
About 43.2% of websites are built on WordPress. The key tools for WordPress websites are plugins. One of the most helpful plugins is the Yoast SEO plugin. It provides on-page SEO as it helps analyze website content and optimize it to get better searchability. Moreover, it offers the following features:
- SEO analysis by conducting an on-page SEO.
- The search engine snippet preview customizes how a post will show on the Google search page, including SEO titl and Meta description.
- Helps connect a WordPress website with other useful tools like Yandex and Google search console.
- While writing articles on WordPress, Yoast SEO checks if the written content has the SEO standards such as article title length, appropriate keyword density, meta tags, and article description.
5. Contact Form 7
All your digital marketing efforts are leading to one final destination, reaching organic users and opening a communication channel with them. Here comes the importance of having some kind of comprehensive contact tool, and contact forms are your best choice.
One of the popular WordPress plugins for creating contact forms is Contact Form7 (CF7), and it’s for free! CF7 helps:
- Reduce spam emails
- Get messages when it suits you
- Keep track of inquiries
- Generate leads by creating lead generation forms
- Build your email marketing list
- Offer support to customers
- Get user submitted content
Automation in digital marketing through Contact Form 7 helps collect your organic user data, e.g., name, email address, position, company, and phone number. Collecting this data is very important for optimizing your digital marketing campaign, which you can get automatically.
Start automating your digital marketing processes today
Ranking first on a Google search page can’t be done without SEO and thoroughly planned digital marketing strategies. However, digital marketing daily tasks can be exhausting and tedious, e.g., site monitoring, keyword rank tracking, backlink analysis, and competitor monitoring. Digital marketing automation takes the heavyweight off your shoulders by automating those boring tasks and providing regular reports. Fortunately, now there are many digital marketing automation tools:
- Screaming Frog automates website monitoring.
- SE Ranking is an automation tool for SEO, keyword research, and backlinks monitoring.
- Hotjar tracks users’ behavior to improve website development.
- Yoast SEO WordPress plugin automates on-page SEO.
- Contact Form7 WordPress plugin helps in automating organic user data collection.
Although those digital marketing automation tools can help you out, they must be used correctly, which needs help from digital marketing experts for optimal and correct results. Hiring Andava’s digital marketing services means bringing a team of experienced digital marketers and SEO professionals to automate your marketing campaigns and provide in-depth reports about issues and potential fixes.
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