You may have created a great website, but if you’re not managing to get any traffic to it, what’s the point in paying for it to be online? As you probably already know, SEO is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to a site, and it’s also cheaper in the long term than PPC and other forms of advertising. There are two different approaches to SEO, manual and automated, and we are going to explore the pros and cons of each in this article.
Manual SEO
Manual SEO basically involves a team of experts, or an individual, implanting various on-page and off-page strategies to boost a site’s visibility in the search engines. The main negatives of manual SEO are that it is incredibly time consuming, and it requires a lot of effort to do. This is why most businesses outsource this task to dedicated SEO companies. Manual SEO also isn’t cheap as you’re not only paying for the time that it takes to complete the process, but you’re also paying for the expertise of those who do it, and their large databases.
That said, manual SEO has some important advantages. For a start, you have full control over your SEO practices, so you can ensure everything you are doing is above board. You can hand pick the sites you build links on, you can ensure the content you publish is high quality and relevant to your business, and you generally get a higher level of service than you do with automated SEO.
Automated SEO
Automated SEO uses software to build links. You can check out this marketing automation buyers guide to find out more. Automated SEO requires very little effort and so it is much cheaper to complete. It makes it easier to handle tedious tasks like website audits, keyword density checks, building tags, and checking for broken links. It also makes analyzing your competitors’ SEO strategies easy and gives you up to date analysis on your own campaigns. Finally, automated SEO lets you schedule tasks, enabling you to complete jobs in advance.
The main disadvantage of automated SEO is that if it’s not monitored correctly, you may end up building low quality, spammy backlinks which can lead to problems with the search engines. The majority of SEO software focuses on building as many links as possible without considering the quality of these links. And, most links built this way are not incorporated in articles of quality, so you’ll receive very little traffic through the links themselves
Which is Best?
Most businesses find that using a mixture of automated and manual SEO is the best solution for them. Automated SEO can be a great help in analyzing your SEO as well as your competitor’s, and it can also help you to build SEO strategies and schedule jobs in advance. However, while these are all advantages, it’s always a good idea to work with an SEO company too in order to ensure you are building quality links that won’t get you in trouble in the future.