Effective SEO is about being efficient in all your SEO work. You may not have time to handle all tasks if you approach them manually, particularly repetitive tasks. As such, it’s important to invest in tools, scripts and automation tools that can take care of the simple and repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on qualitative work that needs your direct attention. This article highlights some important tools that you can use to increase your SEO productivity.

  1. Google Analytics data extraction and reporting

One of the repetitive tasks you’ll have to do is generate monthly reports on Google Analytics, and this can take up an entire day (which is a lot out of every month!). Manually pulling GA data needs you to confirm entering the right date ranges, apply the correct segments, analyze the right metrics and confirm that you’re using the right profile through all these.

If you could automate this process, you stand to not only save time, but also eliminate human error and ensure consistency during reporting. You can do this by scheduling reports within Google Analytics, but one the best tools for thisis Google Analytics Add-on for Sheets. Once you include the add-on in your Google Sheets, you’ll be able to get data straight from GA API without even logging into your analytics interface.

Start by configuring the date ranges, metrics, profile and segments to be pulled by the API. Next, just run the report and the data will automatically be loaded onto the spreadsheet. The best part about all this is that once the reporting framework is configured, you can drastically reduce the length of time taken to pull GA data/reports every month.

For most reports, you’ll just change the date range at the start of the month and the GA API will apply your segments and collect necessary metrics. It is also possible to create charts within the spreadsheet which reference cells into which the data will be pulled. Every month, you’ll make very small adjustments on the charts to get what you need.

  1. Internal link-building opportunities

Internal links are very important ranking factors, even though they don’t receive as much airplay. With internal linking, you can optimize your landing pages for the particular keywords that you’re targeting, but you also have a chance to strategically spread out link equity so that your important landing pages can be elevated.

As such, it is always recommended that people should improve their internal linking profile, something that has been proven to work even in the most competitive keyword fields. Large and enterprise-level websites can find it hard to take advantage of any promising internal linking opportunity.

This is where Screaming Frog comes in. The tool is equipped with a search feature that takes out all the hassle from finding an internal linking opportunity. Before running its crawler on your site, navigate to Configuration>>Custom>>Search and include the keywords you’re looking to optimize for.

From here, Screaming Frog crawls the entire site and will return all URLs using that text within its custom report section. You can search for up to 10 separate keywords simultaneously and include various variations of the keyword being optimized for.

You can choose to pair the search with the Include/Exclude feature in Screaming Frog so that you can look for opportunities in particular places in your site. For better productivity, install the OpenList extension, which will open all relevant URLs in different tabs after search.

  1. Keyword research scaling

Google is now much more advanced in its ability to understand a webpage’s content because of the improved entity recognition capability. It is better able to process language and group related terms to glean out the context.

This means that it’s very important that you understand all your core keywords and all terms semantically related to it. More and more search professionals are turning to keyword techniques which include concepts like TF-IDF.

Because Google has increased its language processing capacity, your pages can rank for even bigger keyword sets than the ones you’re directly optimizing for. This is excellent news in terms of SEO, but it can be daunting when you’re just starting out with your keyword research: How can you know all keyword combinations that should be optimized for? And which ones should actually be used on the page?

This is where the Merge Words tool comes in handy. This is a simple tool which allows you to include words in three different columns, after which, according to its name, it will create all possible combinations of the terms you have entered. Rather than spending valuable time manually plugging keywords into your research tool, such as Google Keyword Planner, you can enter all the identifiers in your Merge Words and then lift the results back into the research tool.

  1. Scaling global SEO improvements

Increasing your SEO productivity doesn’t only refer to particular tactics relating to easier data collection. Productive SEOs should also be able to apply the same thinking to their entire campaigns in order to scale their successes.

While it is helpful to have page-level changes implemented, it is still tedious to optimize your websites on a page-by-page basis, and in the end, it can cause diminished returns on effort. Nowhere is this truer than when dealing with larger, enterprise-scale websites. Picking changes in individual pages would actually do very little in improving organic visibility of the website as a whole.

Instead, what Rochester search engine optimization’s need to look at is ways in which they can make global/sitewide changes that will improve SEO on the site as a whole. Such improvements will be the best use for your valuable time as an SEO since making a single change in one place leads to improvements in thousands of pages within the site.

Now, how will you find out which changes can be implemented globally? The one thing often done is to change up the meta description and title tag template logic in order to include valuable modifiers, words and phrases commonly searched for with your target keywords.

Another global improvement might be to weed out errors tucked within your website template. Screaming Frog is your best friend in this endeavor. You can begin by crawling the website and then sort out all reports offered by Screaming Frog according to “Inlinks”. This will show the number of links that have errors in the entire site.

You will probably find internal 404 errors and 301 redirects which have thousands of inlinks leading to them. This is a useful clue that you have a sitewide error, and simply fixing the template can fix the problem in most or all of the affected URLs.

 

Conclusion

Increasing output in your SEO means making efficiency, productivity and scalability core tenets which your work should stand on. You should always be looking for better and faster ways to increase your output without sacrificing the quality of your results. This will leave you free to do much more for your clients and actually make significant improvements to their organic visibility within much shorter timelines and without burning yourself out.

 

Author bio:

Mark B. founded and runs one of the best SEO Company and has over ten years’ experience in SEO and digital marketing as a whole. He has shared SEO insights on countless platforms online and offline and continues to do so whenever he has a free moment.