SEO can be incredibly rewarding—but let's face it, it's also tedious.
The hours spent on repetitive tasks like keyword research, tracking rankings, and writing content can quickly drain your resources. What if you could automate these tasks and instead invest your time into making strategic and creative decisions?
Take Surfer as an example. With SEO automation, we're publishing up to 20 high-quality blog posts per month with just two team members, consistently boosting organic traffic without increasing headcount.
In this article, you'll discover exactly how to streamline your SEO strategy through automation, covering everything from keyword research to SEO writing and performance monitoring.
What you will learn
- What SEO automation is
- The benefits of automation
- How to automate SEO tasks
What is SEO automation?
SEO automation is using software or tools to automatically perform repetitive and time-consuming SEO tasks that would otherwise require manual effort so you can concentrate on strategy and important decisions.
This includes everything from keyword research and rank tracking to content optimization and technical audits.
SEO automation isn't about replacing human expertise—it's about amplifying it. The goal is to let machines handle the repetitive work so your team can focus on strategy and creativity.
– Surfy, AI writing assistant @Surfer
Rather than spending hours manually checking rankings, analyzing competitors, or searching for content gaps, SEO automation tools can deliver this information quickly and accurately, often in real-time dashboards that make data visualization and interpretation more efficient.
An example of SEO automation is an e-commerce website that might schedule an SEO audit tool to run every Monday morning, flagging new 404 errors from discontinued products before customers encounter them.
3 reasons to automate SEO tasks
Well reason number is to save time so you can direct your efforts into areas that actually move sales for your business.
Writer's enterprise AI survey reveals a wide range of benefits that users are seeing from using generative AI tools at their workplace.
Here are a few reasons why automating SEO tasks can be beneficial,
Scalability
With content production skyrocketing, manually managing your content is going to eat up far more time and effort than is viable. With the amount of content churned out today, especially with the rapid advent of AI writing tools, scale is essential to your content strategy.
Saves time
SEO professionals spend hours on unproductive repetitive tasks that could be automated. There really is no reason to visit and download analytics data everyday.
Several SEO tasks involve repetition that can be automated instead to significantly reduce the time spent on these tasks.
Data-driven research
Modern SEO tools can analyze millions of keywords and competitor data points in minutes.
You can delegate performance analytics to AI tools instead of learning complex SEO forecasting models, or poring over rows of keyword ranking data from Google Search Console.
Automating SEO isn't new and businesses have likely been using automation with SEO tools to some extent in bits and pieces. But partially using AI to automate the odd SEO task won't make a significant difference to your content workflow.
Instead, let's take a look at how you can use SEO automation tools for significant chunks of your SEO program.
More than 90% of workers recently surveyed said automation solutions increased their productivity, and 85% said these tools boosted collaboration across their teams. Nearly 90% also said they trusted automation solutions to get more done without errors and help them make decisions faster.
– Harvard Business Review
Can SEO be automated?
Yes, SEO for your website can be automated to a large extent. Automation is particularly useful for frequently performed tasks like site audits, keyword rank trackings, content creation, and performance reporting.
Take Surfer's approach.
We automate keyword research that is connected to content briefs, which feed on-page optimization suggestions to our writers, which are then monitored for keyword rankings when our pages go live.
This end-to-end automation helps us publish 10-20 blog posts per month with a team of just 2. And we've continued to increase organic traffic year-over-year while maintaining the same headcount.
9 tasks for SEO automation
Here are 9 ways to start automating your SEO program.
1. Use AI to find keywords and topics
SEO results are grounded in selecting the most realistic topics for your website.
You can automatically generate a list of topics for your website with free keyword research tools like,
You can also use Google's Autocomplete, People Also Ask and Related Searches.
Unfortunately, choosing the right keywords for your website isn't as simple as picking topics that your audience likes and are relevant for your business.
You must consider keyword difficulty, search volume, traffic potential and the competition.
While everyone chases low-difficulty, high-volume keywords, your competitors are doing the same—leaving few opportunities.
A smart approach is to assess whether the keyword is within your website's authority tier. Which means you should look at who is ranking and what their pages look like.
And aim for topic ideas that fall within your scope.
If you are signed up with Surfer, the Topical Map tool can help you automatically find relevant blog post ideas for your blog.
- Log into Surfer
- Connect your website or enter a seed topic
- Click Create Topical Map
For example, let's say that you have a website about gardening tools. You could use the search term, "gardening tools."
In a couple of seconds, Surfer suggests 1233 keyword ideas for new blog posts on your gardening website. Here's a snippet of some article ideas.
Potentially, you now have 1233 blog posts to write. Depending on if you're using AI for SEO, that's enough content for a couple of months, or years.
Clicking on a topic will reveal additional keyword metrics like the monthly search volume, related keywords and keyword difficulty.
In comparison, manual keyword research for an entire website can take weeks, and must be revisited often. Not to mention taking off duplicates, and ensuring you're not mistakenly indulging in content cannibalization.
2. Automate content briefs
Creating content outlines can help you write blog posts faster, whether you're creating them yourself, or outsourcing content. They can also help ensure that your writers cover essential talking points and build a content layout that you approve of.
Here's a prompt you can use in ChatGPT to generate an outline.
Write an article outline for the "[topic]" with H2s and H3s and bullet points.
Begin with instructions for an introduction followed by a "What you will learn" in bold followed by the remaining headers. Always end with a H2 labelled "Key takeaways."
Add 3-5 talking points under each header. Be detailed and instructional in your talking points.
Your talking points under each header must be instructions and not explanations. For example, ask the writer to explain, discuss, or expand on the points under each header by providing clear instructions in full sentences or paragraphs.
Assume you are instructing a novice writer who will need specific direction and have to be told exactly what to write about.
Optional: Use this as a reference article >
Before you start the brief, you can provide 2-3 URLs of top ranking pages for the same topic. Ensure that the references are the exact topic that the brief is being generated for.
If you prefer more control, ask the AI tool to build the outline according to headers that you provide.
Here are 3 free tools to use to write content outlines.
You can also generate blog post outlines inside Surfer AI by entering your main topic.
Surfer analyzes the top ranking pages for your search query to generate an outline that you can edit. Take a couple of minutes to review the outline and edit any headers so the generated article follows your chosen content layout.
3. Write SEO articles with AI
SEO content writing for hundreds of keywords can seem like a never-ending list of things to do.
And while AI can help you write articles, it cant write entire ready-to-publish articles that will help you rank in the search results.
The utility of AI writing tools lies in their ability to quickly process information that keeps you writing. Don't (mis)use them to generate hundreds of low-value articles.
Automation shines when you hit writer's block, because the tool can do the thinking for you.
Writing blog posts can be automated to an extent because many aspects of the content writing process involves predictable, repetitive patterns.
AI content writers can generate content around specific SEO guidelines, and follow predefined templates or formatting standards.
This allows your human writers to concentrate on quality, factual accuracy, and E-E-A-T indicators, speeding up your content publishing cycle so your content can scale.
Claude AI offers a free interface to write long-form content. You can select one of its existing writing styles, or build your own.
To automate drafts inside Surfer, click on the Let's write button once you're satisfied with the content outline to let Surfer AI write your article's first version in a couple of minutes.
When done, you will find a complete article inside Surfer's Content Editor that is based on the outline that you provided.
Surfer AI wrote this article with 1751 words, 23 headings and 37 paragraphs in a few minutes. It even has a fairly high Content Score on the first attempt.
Spend some humanizing the AI generated content to add examples and insights from your experience.
Edit any AI phrases for readability, and to verify facts and statistics for your readers. And you can also consider detecting AI content as a last step before publishing.
4. Automate on-page optimization
On-page optimization can often become a bottleneck since content writers may prefer to focus on storytelling and omit best practices for on-page SEO.
Leading to an SEO specialist who then has to step in and correct the page's on-page elements, slowing the overall content workflow.
This two-step process—writing first and optimizing later—can cause delays, and increase your team's duties.
On-page keyword optimization is a simple task to automate. Automation tools can quickly analyze each page, suggest optimal keyword placements based on SEO best practices, and even automatically update meta titles, descriptions, or header tags at scale.
Ahrefs offers a free meta description writer and title generator. Some other free on-page tools are
If you're using writing articles with Surfer AI, these on-page elements will done for you.
You can also browse through the Terms panel in Surfer where you will find a list of automatically recommended keywords and their frequency for your target keyword.
To automate the inclusion of relevant keywords in your article instead, click on the Auto-optimize feature for Surfer to insert keywords in the body of your article.
You will be presented with a list of actions where Surfer automatically included keywords into your content. You can then edit, accept or dismiss the changes.
Click Save and close when you're done.
5. Research content
Manual research for content is limited by how much time and appetite a writer a writer may have before a publishing deadline.
There are only so many Youtube videos and pay-walled articles one can access for free.
It's also error-prone.
Researching information, finding case studies, examples, and statistics is a good candidate for automation can be automated with tools scanning vast amounts of information in seconds, identifying relevant insights, and curating sources for quick review.
Automating research allows writers to focus on analysis, creativity, and refining the narrative, rather than spending hours hunting down reliable facts and figures.
Perplexity AI's Deep Research model takes your instructions to find relevant sources and craft a data backed narrative on your topic in a few minutes.
The research is high quality and would take a human analyst several hours.
ChatGPT has a similar model that will also ask you clarifying questions before starting its research process.
And then summarize the points that it will investigate. You can see it took about 6 minutes to compile these facts, and cited 35 sources.
6. Analyze competitors
Looking into what your competitors are doing can be quite a cumbersome process. For starters, you have zero to little visibility on their actual SEO metrics, and have to rely on third party data.
Then you have a list of never-ending tasks that require continual monitoring and have to be done frequently.
Automated SEO softwares are a more efficient way to perform competitor content analysis.
They can find how competitors use keywords, the structure of their content, their backlink profiles, and topical coverage among other SEO efforts.
You can learn and extract insights quickly and at scale, and then embed them into your SEO campaigns to stay competitive.
Here's a free competior analysis tool from Backlinko.
You can also get started with ChatGPT for qualitative data and industry commentary.
Here are 4 paid tools.
Surfer automatically analyzes organic competitor pages in the search engine results for your target keywords for their keyword optimization and on-page SEO.
You can also include or exclude pages if you want specific information.
7. Automated keyword tracking
It's fine to remember which of your top pages rank well, but manually checking tens or hundreds of rankings is not really practical for SEO analysis.
An automated rank tracker solves this problem by regularly checking and logging keyword positions at scale—daily, weekly, or monthly—across multiple locations and devices. It provides real-time visibility into what’s working, what’s slipping, and where new opportunities lie.
Automated rank tracking with SEO software allows you to react quickly, measure the impact of optimizations, and make data-driven decisions without wasting time on manual tracking.
There are a lot of freely available tools in this area.
For starters, Google Search Console is a free tool that summarizes your website's SEO performance. The average position report inside Performance > Search results attaches page URLs and keywords to their respective positions in the SERPs.
The drawback with using GSC is that while it's a very good starting point, it doesn't reveal historical data or additional metrics that can help you.
Take Surfer's Rank Tracker for instance which displays ranking history, SERP features and average cost per click that advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords, showing you how valuable ranking is.
Additional free automatic keyword ranking tools are
8. Monitoring your SEO performance
Monitoring SEO can help you catch issues early—like a sudden drop in rankings, a page getting deindexed, or a drop in traffic—and take corrective action.
While tracking your SEO performance inside analytics tools is helpful, it's not enough. You should be proactively looking for areas of improvement and under-optimized pages.
However, doing this manually can take hours.
Automation tools can pull data from platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, aggregate it, and visualize trends without human intervention.
You'll also receive alerts for sudden changes to make faster, data-informed decisions and stay ahead of issues before they escalate.
A tool like Screaming Frog can help monitor your pages by crawling it frequently.
You can automate SEO monitoring with Surfer's Content Audit as well. The tool will continue to audit your content and recommend which pages should be improved based on their on-site performance and ranking history.
9. Automate SEO reporting
We know that tracking SEO results are important, but creating reports manually can take hours.
You may have to gather data from multiple tools (like Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush), clean it, interpret it, and format it into clear, visual summaries.
Automated reporting solves this by pulling and organizing the data for you, so you get consistent, up-to-date insights without the manual grunt work.
Looker Studio is a widely used platform for automatically creating custom SEO reports that enable you to pull data and integrate information from multiple sources.
You can also use Surfer's reporting feature that automatically displays and breaks down your Google Search Console data. Surfer also helps you set up performance goals that you can then track the progress of.
Key takeaways
- Understanding SEO automation can significantly enhance your SEO strategy by allowing you to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, freeing up time for strategic and creative efforts.
- Automating keyword research, content creation, and on-page optimization can dramatically improve efficiency and scalability in your content marketing efforts.
- SEO automation tools like Surfer can help streamline various SEO processes, from keyword tracking to competitor analysis.
- Monitoring SEO performance and automating SEO reporting are crucial for identifying issues early and making data-driven decisions to optimize your website's performance.
- While automation can handle many tasks, human expertise remains essential for maintaining content quality, factual accuracy, and strategic oversight.
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