Automated software may at first seem like a cheaper alternative to SEO consulting but unless you can get good results out of it you will most likely be better off getting a human touch. Despite what their sales pitches will tell you, automated software packages do not come with a magic button that will skyrocket your site to the top of the rankings.
Real People Get Real Results
Although automated software can be good for some aspects of SEO, such as keyword research, the fact is that you need real people optimizing your site if you want to see real results. You can’t just expect a piece of software to cater to your personal needs as much as a team of experts in the SEO consulting field can.
When you are dealing with a team of experts, such as the experienced people at Lead to Conversion or other consulting companies, you can be sure that they will be accountable to you and ready to answer any questions you may have about the process. On the other hand, automated software will simply give you some general guidelines to operate it with no specificity toward your site at all.
Safety and Control
When you use automated software it seems as if you can get a whole lot more work done in a shorter period of time than doing it yourself manually, or hiring someone else to do it, but with that speed you also lose control. Depending on which software you use, you may also be unknowingly using unethical SEO methods (black hat) that could get you penalized or even banned from search engines without any warning.
For example, the software you are using could be creating hundreds or even thousands of low quality links pointing toward your site in an attempt to boost your credibility and Google PageRank. Your application will most likely attempt to do this by spamming forums and comment sections on blogs with unnatural and unrelated text with a link to your site, which is very easy for most major search engines to catch and they will not be happy about it.
Long Term vs Short Term
Before you begin your journey in to the world of SEO you need to make a decision on whether you want to be a flash in the pan, here one day and gone the next, or have a sustainable and long term growth plan.
In the short term, automated software may be able to give you a boost in rankings and traffic but this is almost always unsustainable due to the methods used. If you let the software run wild and spam your link all over the place it could help for a few weeks, possibly even a few months, but the search engines will catch up with you sooner or later.
On the other hand, if you hire a team of SEO professionals you can create sustainable growth through honest and ethical optimization methods that will keep you safe from getting penalized or banned. In this case, quality over quantity is the main concern.
There are pros and cons to both automated and human SEO processes, and you may even find both helpful, but if you decide to use software at any point you must always be sure you know exactly what it is doing and whether it is using unethical practices.
