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by Barbara Coelho | June 05, 2020 | 0 Comments
Hamlet sits down with Barry Schwartz, a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and owner of the Rusty Brick, a web-based consulting firm, at the TechSEO Boost Conference in Boston, M.A. to explore how technologies like spreadsheets and Python can be useful to automate and scale tedious and repetitive SEO tasks.
Engineers are native problem solvers who thrive off of improving inefficiencies. They are driven by the desire to constantly find better solutions and optimizations to provide a more efficient way of getting things done. Their nature, put simply, can be defined from the phrase, “I can’t stand this, I need to fix it.”
Fixing every single thing that’s seen as a problem is inefficient in and of itself, as not everything is worthy of the time it requires, hence, it’s important to choose issues that will provide the most benefit to your client/users.
With SEO, your hands are always full doing the basics—mapping URLs, completing migrations, finding content gaps, generating meta descriptions, rewriting titles for optimizations, etc. These tasks, although necessary to drive results, are tedious and time-consuming, proving to be a daunting commitment.
Automating these monotonous tasks can make your life much easier and save you a significant amount of time that can be utilized more efficiently. The key is to take baby steps, don’t try to become a programmer overnight from scratch. Although you could hire a developer to complete the tasks for you, it may be difficult to translate exactly what you want and how you want it done.
Hamlet suggests the best way to start the automation process is by documenting the things you are already doing. Think of writing this in pseudocode, trying to describe the tasks so that a machine could perform them. By following this approach, you can proceed to give the pseudocode to a developer who now has a better understanding of your vision.
The next step is to recognize which tasks can be automated using simple tools like Excel and functions, which prove to be very useful for SEO. Beware that you may run into a roadblock, where you can’t get past a certain point.
This is where you can take advantage of Python and data science to help you see what is possible. You can use this knowledge along with your domain expertise to make the connections that will enable you to reach the next level in automation.
By starting small, you can work your way up to complete automation where you’ll be saving time and improving your own efficiency.
To learn more about how Python can amplify automation, read our previous blog post, Python for SEOs.
How to Use Python to Analyze SEO Data: A Reference Guide
9 Practical Ways to easily use Google Sheets for SEO tasks
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