Can SEO be (fully) automated?

[demib]

Many tools, plugins and apps (more or less) promise you fully automated SEO. But is that really possible? Can you fully automate SEO or is it just a (not entirely true) sales pitch?

Well, to be honest some tasks can indeed and should definitely be automated. Tedious and repetitive tasks can be automated and technical formats indented for machine reading (such as XML and Schema) should be automated (not the least to avoid human errors).

However, very often you need a human input for all this to be well optimized. For example, for Video XML and Schema there are contextual elements that can't be automatically extracted from the video that is very important to include. Also, with Hreflang you can't always automatically map all pages.

Some things are somewhat in between - it can be optimized but may not produce the best results - such as your copy writing.

But after we automate everything we can and should we are still left with a number of very important SEO-tasks that just can't - or should not be fully automated.

First of all there is the importance of SEO-analysis and -strategies. That can't be automated. Sure you can and should be using tools for this but a qualified human need to use them. You need to understand your market, competitors, search trends, search user intend and based on that develop a strong SEO-strategy.

Next we have the content. The actual writing of the content still (in most cases) is best done by humans. But not only that - the structure of the content, the types of pages that is optimized for it and the technical formats used (blogs, FAQ's, category pages, product pages or FAQ elements - just to mention a few) and design to perfectly match "search user intend" is very important. This can not be automatically optimized either.

And to mention just one thing more now: Links. Both internal and external links is still a very important and strong SEO-factor. 

Even though some will tell you they can automate all internal and external linkbuilding in my experience what you get is crap. At best, it works for a very short time. Often not and never in the long run. Linkbuilding require human skills and a lot of hard work. Tools can be helpful, sure, but fully automated? No way!

[soleseriouss]

Agree, It can be but won't be beneficial in long run!