9 Best SEO Automation Tools to Drive Organic Traffic

Have you ever been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of effort that goes into executing a comprehensive SEO strategy? An effective strategy includes tasks like reporting, monitoring, researching, analyzing, link building, and creating content, which can be time-consuming and tedious.

And now, you need to be thinking beyond search engines, integrating Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) into your content strategy. As visits to major LLM platforms skyrocket, you’ll be left behind if you don’t start optimizing for AI visibility. So, we’ll also introduce you to some tools that are dominating this market.

While this may all seem like a lot, don’t lose hope just yet; SEO automation tools can reduce the amount of time and effort you put into these tasks, allowing you to dedicate more time to creative and strategic tasks.

In the following guide, we’ll cover what SEO tasks can be automated, the best tools for doing so, and whether optimization is going to be fully automated in the future.

What Tasks Can Be Automated With SEO AI Software?

There are many SEO tasks that can be automated, related to all disciplines of SEO. Some of the key SEO tasks that AI can automate are:

• Technical SEO
• Keyword strategy
• Content creation and optimization
• Competitor analysis
• Link building and reporting
• Monitoring and reporting key metrics
• Predictive analytics

9 Best SEO Automation Tools

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an excellent tool that automates technical SEO tasks like site audits, backlink analysis, competitor analysis, and more.

Ahrefs automates site audits by scheduling them on a pre-set schedule that you create, which crawls your entire site and checks each page for over 170 technical and on-page SEO issues. It detects issues like broken links, slow page speed, and redirect loops.

You can use Page Explorer to access raw data from the crawl. You can filter out pages based on specific criteria such as page content, organic traffic, and the number of links.

Ahrefs’ site structure report presents competitors’ site structure in a tree format alongside SEO metrics. This tool categorizes the website into subfolders and tells you how much traffic each one gets to help you plan your content strategy.

Ahrefs can also automate an organic keywords report, which gives you a list of all the keywords that any given site ranks for, along with the estimated search volume for each keyword. This tool helps you discover low-hanging fruit keywords and featured snippet opportunities. You can also uncover your competitor’s top-ranking pages to find individual topics performing well in your niche.

• Best For: Monitoring your website, performing site audits, and automating backlink reports.
• Pricing: Plans start at $129/month.

2. Semrush

Semrush is a comprehensive SEO automation tool with features for keyword research, link building, competitor analysis, on-page SEO, and more.

Semrush has great competitor analysis features, such as the organic research report, which gives insights into the keywords and estimated search traffic that any given site ranks for. You can use this to determine keywords and backlinks that you should be targeting to be competitive in your niche.

Semrush is also a great platform for content planning. Their SEO content template automates the creation of content briefs by providing the information you should include to be competitive for your chosen keyword.

Beyond the ones discussed, Semrush has a multitude of useful features, and works well as a comprehensive SEO suite of tools. They even have an AI SEO tool that measures your visibility in AI platforms.

• Best For: Keyword research, content planning, monitoring site performance, and competitor analysis.
• Pricing: Their basic plan is $139/month

3. SurferSEO

SurferSEO is a data-driven SEO automation tool that can help you optimize existing pages, create new content, perform SEO audits, and even track AI visibility. By analyzing what already works in the search results, it gives you a roadmap for an on-page SEO strategy.

SurferSEO provides a suite of features, including its content editor, which helps you optimize your content as you write, and a content audit tool that identifies issues on existing pages, offers solutions, and even auto-optimization in some instances. It also has a SERP analyzer for competitor analysis that helps you research your niche and keywords so you can compete.

The core benefit of SurferSEO is its ability to remove the guesswork from on-page SEO. It suggests which keywords to use, how many images to include, and the ideal word count to compete with top-ranking content.

• Best For: Optimizing existing and newly written content, keyword research, and competitive analysis.
• Pricing: Starts at $99/month with its most basic plan.

4. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a great tool for monitoring your keywords, auditing your pages to determine if they are well-optimized, checking backlinks, and performing competitor analysis.

Notably, it offers visibility tracking tools for AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, and other AI tools, as well.

SE Ranking groups its main features into two categories:

• SEO Research: keyword research, backlink checker, and SERP tracker
• SEO Monitoring: Rank tracker, Website audit, on-page SEO checker

It offers many of the same features as Ahrefs and SEMrush at a lower price. However, SE Ranking’s capabilities are more bare bones.

• Best For: Monitoring site performance and ensuring your content is SEO-adherent.
• Pricing: Plans start at $52/month.

5. MarketMuse

MarketMuse is an AI content strategy tool that performs competitive analysis and helps you build authority by analyzing your existing content and identifying strategic opportunities.

MarketMuse’s content brief tool automates the creation of content briefs, which can be a time-consuming step in your SEO strategy. It also has a competitive content analysis feature to determine content gaps, and a content optimizer that tells you what topics you’ve missed in real-time.

The core benefit of MarketMuse is its emphasis on building topical authority by helping you plan, create, and optimize content at scale. It removes the subjectivity from content strategy by providing data-driven recommendations on how to create content that improves your ROI.

• Best For: Content optimization, competitive analysis, and building authority.
• Pricing: It offers a free tier, but reach out to MarketMuse about the pricing structure of upgraded plans.

6. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is known for their SEO Spider Tool, one of the best for automating technical SEO audits.

The software crawls your site and creates extensive reports on critical issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and slow page speed. You can schedule your site crawl to occur daily, weekly, or monthly.

The crawl report not only lists any issues found with your site, but also provides insights on how to fix them. It also offers integration with Google, so you can export your reports into Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights.

Screaming Frog can also generate an XML sitemap that you can submit directly to Google.

• Best For: Crawling your site and pinpointing technical SEO issues.
• Pricing: $279/year, but they offer a free version with fewer capabilities.

7. Frase

Frase is a great tool for content planning and keyword research.

Frase allows you to analyze SERPs, keywords, links, word count, format, and word length and images of competitors for a relevant search query and compare them with your content. It is a helpful tool to ensure your content aligns with the top-ranking search results.

You can create content directly in Frase, and it will automatically highlight keywords to target, and how many of them you have and should include. Frase will rate your content based on how well it aligns with the keywords and the content in the top results. To increase your content score, add more keywords, links, and images, and hit the recommended word count.

Frase is intuitive and user-friendly, as keywords turn green once it detects them in your content. You can click on a keyword in the suggestions panel to see how competitors use it in their content.

By integrating keyword research with the actual writing process, Frase’s many features take the hassle out of content planning.

• Best For: Content planning, keyword research, and content optimization.
• Pricing: The starter plan is $45/month.

8. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a trend analysis tool that identifies emerging topics before they become mainstream. It helps you with SEO automation by spotting industries, products, and keywords that are experiencing rapid growth, giving you a head start on targeting them.

The tool features a database of over 1.1 million trends that you can filter by industry, growth rate, and timeframe. It also includes trending products and trending startups to help you see the bigger picture and connect seemingly unrelated topics.

Exploding Topics is useful for creating timely content around a trend before it’s saturated, ensuring your efforts have a higher chance of success.

• Best For: keyword research, topic research.
• Pricing: Paid plans start at $39/month, though they also offer a free version.

9. Goodie

Okay, okay, we know Goodie isn’t technically an SEO tool, but since we already mentioned AEO AI visibility in our other recommendations, we figured we’d suggest a comprehensive tool for it.

Goodie is a platform designed to help businesses increase their visibility and brand presence within AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. It provides insights to help you understand how your brand is being represented in LLMs and SERP features like AI Overviews.

Goodie offers the ability to automate AI visibility optimization, which helps you boost your visibility in AI search results with targeted semantic recommendations. The platform’s real-time insights, performance dashboards, and actionable recommendations combined will help build brand reputation and reach a wider audience.

Goodie helps businesses build on their pre-existing SEO with AEO strategies, ensuring their brand is a trusted source for AI-generated answers and insights.

• Best For: AI visibility monitoring, AI optimization, topic research, and content creation.
• Pricing: Reach out to Goodie’s team to request a pricing structure for your business.

Is SEO Going to Be Fully Automated in the Future?

While these tools are helpful, they’re meant to supplement human efforts, not replace them entirely. AI is great at handling tedious, data-heavy tasks like audits, analysis, and research, but human intervention, creativity, and strategy are still necessary components to creating top-tier content.