How to choose the best between Manual and Automated SEO?

Reputation Defender
4 min readJul 20, 2016
Image courtesy of startupstockphotos.com at Pexels.com

Search engine Optimization is the best technique and one of the cheapest ways to drive highly targeted traffic to a website. A good strategy makes the foundation for successful SEO results. Creating a great website is one thing, but driving traffic to that site is another. With good on-page and off-page SEO, your website can take high positions on the SERPs thus driving a large amount of traffic to your website. Basically we have two types of SEO methods which are used for achieving traffic results: Manual SEO and Automated SEO. With the thousands of SEO software and SEO platforms in the digital marketing world, it has become quite difficult to decide whether to hire a SEO agency or use the available SEO platforms. Most of these SEO platforms and software can do anything related to SEO like keyword research, social bookmarking, directory submission, blog commenting, forum posting, and more. With all the advancements in technology, it has become possible for search engine optimization, or SEO, to be an automated process rather than the traditional manual one. Both types have their level of advantages and complexities. Many online marketers consider automated SEO over manual SEO while others go completely opposite. On the contrary, some like to experiment with mixed ratios. All of this together makes it difficult to decide which SEO technique is better. But which one should you implement?

Manual SEO involves an individual or team of SEO experts implementing the various on-page and off-page SEO strategies into a website by hand. Automated SEO, on the other hand, involves the use of software to implement SEO strategies into a site. Not all software is meant for spamming. These aim to extend help in easing SEO efforts. To help you determine which between manual and automated SEO is better for your website, we’ll have a look at the pros and cons of each approach.

Manual vs. Automated

Source imgur.com

Manual SEO

Manual SEO involves great amount of planning and coordination for the SEO team to carry out various activities on-page and off-page SEO activities. Besides being a little slower, the manual SEO is much appreciated over others due to being more authentic. Implementing manual SEO into your website will guarantee a better quality performance from your strategy, as it is focusing on the quality of your website. It helps to achieve the high quality of your backlinks, as you are able to track and pick them yourself. It is the only way to create relevant and original content for your website without risking plagiarism. But, it is a highly time consuming process that involves a high level of dedication and effort on the behalf of your SEO team. An SEO expert can take hours to submit 10 websites to search engines. It is a very slow way to implement strategies into your website and takes a long time to be effective. If you are planning on completing SEO for a large company, doing it manually is near impossible or will take years. With distinct benefits and advantages associated with each of these SEO methods, it makes sense to perhaps incorporate the good elements of each, as they tend to cancel each other’s bad characteristics out.

Automated SEO

Automated SEO refers to software that can be purchased to complete all of your tasks with little effort on your part. There are toolbars available for download that assist in effective SEO for websites, but these are ‘tools’, not the sole origin of your SEO, so is not considered fully automated. Automation has far exceeded the manual efforts. So is the case with SEO. Multitude of efficient automated software are present which are successfully enabled to carry out basic SEO activities like social bookmarking, blog commenting, keyword researching, forum posting etc. You can easily handle the tedious and time-consuming tasks like site audits. You can check for broken links or keyword density, tags, and Meta content in large websites. It is easier and faster to complete SEO tasks automatically over manually, saving you time and effort. It helps you to build a search engine friendly website by checking for broken links and completing other tedious tasks that can be highly time consuming when done manually. It enables you to keep an eye on your competitors, as many programs will follow their rankings and delve into their SEO strategies for you. Buy when not used properly, SEO software can create low quality backlinks. The low quality backlinks can get your site penalized. Most SEO software focus on quantity over quality, which could lead to problems in the long run. Most links created through automation can never be a source of traffic to your site.

Whichever you choose, Reputation Defender suggests you consider your options carefully. You will likely find that a mixture of both automated and manual SEO will work for you and will be dependent on the tasks at hand. A successful SEO campaign should be built out over time. Far sighted decisions will pay dividends in the long run.

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