They say knowledge and information is power. In SEO this saying sounds specifically acute, because it’s not just knowledge that helps you stay in the avant garde. It’s having this knowledge in a timely manner and being able to apply it in a way that is beneficial that really counts. This is why we at Serpzilla value knowledge and relevant information about SEO, strive to accumulate it and share it with our users and partners. For this reason we have recently carried out a large-scale research which involved surveying Serpzilla users and site visitors. The survey revolved around the use of SEO strategies, the place of link building in SEO and customer pains and needs when it comes to link building.
This survey allowed us to gather invaluable information and arrive at amazing insights which we share in full in a White Paper. In this article, we would like to highlight one aspect of link building which our survey reveals poses a challenge to SEO specialists and opens up a wealth of opportunities for them at the same time. It’s automation
The Current State of Link Building
Our survey unveiled a mass of insights on how marketers and SEO specialists view link building. All of these findings prove that link building is going to be crucial for SEO and SERP results for a long time yet. This opinion appears to be a shared consensus among the SEO crowd. Here are some key points and trends that will influence the SEO market when it comes to link building.
- SEO specialists still consider paid links as a good investment. More than half of our respondents pay and/or are willing to continue to pay for links. This fact is especially important in light of the following: the vast majority of SEO specialists understand that paid links pose certain risks, but go on with them .
- Growing disparity between link building budgets and efforts and resources needed to maintain a good backlink profile. This problem is specifically acute, because SEO specialists need to constantly maneuver between tightening Google regulations, growing competition and limited funds.
- SEO software market prioritizing enterprise-level customers. There’s a lot of outcry on the market about the steep prices of quality software for link building which make them unaffordable for smaller teams and projects. Speaking of teams, smaller projects and even one-man teams were predominant among our survey participants.
Automation Imperative
Considering the points mentioned above, a lot of our survey participants mention the growing need of automation in their SEO activities and in link building in particular.
The figure below demonstrated frequently used link building methods that our participants worked with recently.
All of these activities deal with massive arrays of data. Be it lists of guest posting prospects, analytic data for potential link building sites, massive contact lists for outreach. Each of these needs to be processed. Most of these activities imply a lot of repetitive work, done multiple times. Some hugely repetitive tasks, like composing outreach emails, also require individual touch for success. Dealing with this manually takes up a huge portion of a SEO specialist’s work. Yet, most of these tasks are straight-forward enough so that they can be automated.
This makes SEO marketers search for solutions that take off the burden of repetitive tasks and free them up for tasks that are really important and do require human resources, such as strategizing, content creation and networking.
What Tasks to Automate?
Our survey reveals that SEO specialists already use automation and it has moved from being a luxury to being a necessity. says Alex Sandro, Senior Product Manager, Serpzilla.
SEO in general and link building in particular have so many facets and so many menial activities you have to repeatedly do on a daily basis that handling it all manually just won’t let you even stand a chance at competing. Automation of as many tasks as possible is the only viable long-term route to effective link building, says Alex Sandro, Senior Product Manager, Serpzilla.
When asked about means of getting backlinks, the majority of our respondents (more than 65%) mentioned that they use some sort of automation like platforms for outreach and / or link building.
Outreach and e-mail campaigns are named as the tasks that are most frequently automated by SEO specialists.
While a large portion of SEOs uses some automation tools or platforms, they only automate certain link building tasks. At the same time, a significant 20% of SEO specialists do their link building only manually.
Does this mean that there’s still quite a bit of tasks that can be automated? Definitely yes.
What Other Tasks Can you Automate with Serpzilla?
We at Serpzilla have made it our priority to help our customers regardless of their team size or link building budget to free up as much of their work time for important tasks as possible. That is why we have focused on delivering solutions that can help you automate link-building tasks.
- Guest Posting Automation
Guest Posting is named as the most popular link building method by our survey participants. As you know, it involves a lot of research, outreach and maintenance. Here’s what Serpzilla can help you to automate and streamline:
- Prospecting for Sources
Our finely-tuned search algorithm and hour huge, constantly updated prospect database is at your service. You can search and save collections of blogs that accept guest posts that are handpicked for your particular purpose and niche. You can nitpick ans select them by a number of criteria aside from that. These criteria include domain authority, price range, geolocation and many others. You can also use collection presets that Serpzilla offers.
- Guest Post Placement
Automated guest post placement saves you a lot of time and effort freeing it up for content creation. With Serpzilla, you can set up multiple guest posts at once and automate a lot of tasks in a workflow for posting guest posts.
- Backlink Monitoring
You can use a comfortable dashboard to monitor your guest post campaigns and your backlink performance. This enables quick action should you want to change something, and a convenient way to analyze your activities and evaluate results.
- Backlink Management Automation
With Serpzilla, you can quickly locate, evaluate and reach out to a multitude of relevant websites that will host your backlinks.
- Advanced Website Selection
Serpzilla uses AI to enhance the process of identifying high-quality, relevant sites. We constantly work to make sure our database includes sites that are safe to use. We strive to take quick action to remove any websites that may pose a threat of spammy backlinks. Serpzilla also offers highly customizable search options to ensure that you will find a good choice of relevant backlink sources for any niche.
- Outreach Campaigns
Never miss a link building opportunity because an email was lost or didn’t get answered to on time. Serpzilla helps you to manage your outreach in an efficient way and with a personal touch to it.
- Monitoring and Analysis
You can get a very clear idea about your backlink performance, improvements and blank spots. You can also evaluate all potential backlink prospects and make a well-informed decision about their relevance and suitability.
- Dashboards
Organizing all your data in convenient dashboards, Serpzilla offers you a quick and accessible way to handle it. Dashboards help to locate the necessary tasks quickly, keep an eye on the state of your link building campaign at all times and receive necessary notifications about important tasks, thus saving you a lot of data searching, sorting and managing time.
Conclusion:
Today, SEO specialists state it as a concrete fact: automation in link building is no longer just a nice-to-have option. It’s a necessity for a successful link building and SEO campaign. The insights gathered from our extensive research make it clear that the demands of modern link building, coupled with increasing complexity and competition, require efficient, scalable solutions. When you set out to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, you can focus on what truly matters: crafting effective strategies, creating compelling content, and building meaningful relationships.
We at Serpzilla are committed to help you do just that: leave the routine tasks to software and free up your hands for working with the more exciting aspects of SEO.
If you want to know more about the findings of our research, we have published all the details as a White Paper which you can download below.
