A Technical SEO Agency Vs Automation – Which One Should You Bet On?
Are you planning to hire a technical SEO agency to be on top of your online marketing game? Given the frequent Google changes and increasing internet users, keeping your website on the first page of any search engine is no easy task.
According to a recent study published by Forbes, there are around 200 million active websites globally fighting to be on the first page of search engines. As of January 2024, there are 5.35 billion internet users worldwide and about 66.2% of the world population is browsing the net for information, entertainment or to make a purchase.
Now, the question is do you need to hire a technical SEO agency to place your website where the eyeballs fall or can you achieve your technical SEO goals just by automating the tasks? Let’s find out.
Technical SEO Audit – A Quick Glance
Before implementing automation or hiring a technical SEO firm, let us understand the basics of technical SEO audit, the pros and cons of hiring a technical SEO firm, and automation tools.
The process of technical SEO audit can be broken down into four major tasks:
Identifying And Fixing Crawlability
You don’t want to hide pages that should be crawled or accessed by the search engines or end up indexing login pages, customer checkout pages, etc. That’s why identifying and fixing robots.txt and XML sitemap issues becomes important. With the help of the audit, a technical SEO agency can help you fix the crawlability issues.
Auditing The Site Architecture
The average bounce rate of a page ranges from 41% to 55%. To avoid users exiting from the site, you need to make sure that it has a proper URL structure, user-friendly navigation, internal linking, and better site hierarchy. Auditing site architecture is all about identifying and fixing these issues to make your site visitor and search engine-friendly.
Spotting And Fixing Multiple Versions Of URLs
Having multiple versions of a URL can hurt your site’s rankings. The aim of a technical SEO audit should be to identify and fix the issues effectively with a sitewide 301 redirect.
Assessing Your Page Speed
Did you know a mere 0.1-second improvement in your website’s loading speed on mobile can improve conversions by 8.4%? Decoding the PageSpeed insights and fixing them plays a major role in your site’s performance.
The Pros and Cons Of Hiring A Technical SEO Agency
Now that we have covered the fundamentals of a technical SEO audit that you can expect a technical SEO agency or an automated tool to deliver, let us understand the pros and cons of deploying both.
Pros Of Hiring A Technical SEO Agency
- Experience: It’s a no-brainer that a technical SEO company can bring in-depth industry experience and insights that could be a game changer for you.
- Comprehensive SEO services: In addition to offering technical SEO services, they could arm you with effective SEO campaigns and quality content.
- Useful data and analytics: A competent technical SEO agency will be able to provide useful data and insights that will help strengthen your online marketing efforts.
Cons Of Hiring A Technical SEO agency
- The quality of service is directly proportionate to your budget: All the technical SEO companies are not equal. You need to put aside a sizable budget to hire a premium agency that offers comprehensive services.
- You need to invest quality time to get quality service: To get the right results from a technical SEO agency, you will have to spend quality time walking them through every step of the project.
- Low-quality backlinks: Quality backlinks matter. If the agency you hire is engaged in shady SEO practices to acquire backlines, Google and other search engines won’t appreciate it.
Hiring A Technical SEO Agency – Top Checklist
Here are a few checklists to keep in mind while hiring a technical SEO company:
- Choose a company that practices white hat and ethical SEO
- Hire a technical SEO firm that offers thorough SEO audits
- Go for a firm that offers regular reports and analysis
- Onboard a firm that believes in collaboration and support
Advantages of Automating Your Technical SEO
Now that we know the pros and cons of hiring a technical SEO agency let us understand how businesses can benefit from technical SEO automation.
Improved accuracy and quality
Data is the backbone of any SEO strategy. An automation tool will be able to generate and process quality data in record time offering you the right solutions at the time.
Increased safety
Sadly, hackers and scammers are a part of the internet. With an automation tool deployed, you don’t have to worry about security breaches.
Increased productivity
In a recent survey conducted by HubSpot, around 72% of the participants believed that automation makes their employees more productive.
Things to consider while purchasing an automation tool
Before purchasing a technical SEO tool, make sure that you get the following features:
- Report of performance data of your website such as redirection logs
- An easy-to-use interface
- 24/7 monitoring and real-time alerts regarding issues that can impact your SEO and site’s performance
A Technical SEO Agency Vs Automation Tool
Now is the time to decide. Should you go for a technical SEO agency or deploy an automation tool that manages your technical audit and fixes? In an ideal world, you should have both at your disposal.
The decision should be based on many factors including your budget, goals, and the results you want to achieve. If you are choosing automation, redirection.io is here to help.
In an ideal world, you should have both a technical SEO agency and a SEO automation tool like redirection.io at your disposal.
Managing your Technical SEO with redirection.io
redirection.io is the best way to automate and manage your website’s technical SEO issues. The audit tool is easy to use and the best part is yet to come – you don’t need a developer or have any coding or technical know-how to use it.
Here is how redirection.io can help achieve your technical SEO goals:
Managing Redirections
Like it or not, redirections are an integral part of SEO. With redirection.io, you can identify duplicate pages or URLs easily and redirect them to the most relevant page.
All you need to do is open the tool’s interface, set up redirections, test and publish. You can do all these in seconds by entering the source and destination URLs in the field mentioned. Feel free to create any number of redirects and track them anytime.
Offering easy HTTPS Migration
Finding multiple versions of a URL while doing a technical SEO audit is one thing, and fixing the issue without having to wait for a developer is an entirely different ball game. Migrating all your duplicate URLs to the most secure HTTPS version is a cakewalk with redirection.io. You can easily transfer all the pages to the HTTPS protocol without leaving the duplicate URLs online.
Making other web migrations easy
redirection.io can do more than just identifying and fixing your common technical SEO issues. For instance, you can automate website traffic management during site migration with the tool. You can establish a list of triggers and actions that help maintain your SEO ranking while giving your visitors a seamless experience.
In short, when you deploy redirection.io, it helps identify technical SEO issues and offers you easy solutions to fix them. You can create redirections as required for search engine indexation. The tool also allows you to edit HTTP headers and HTML meta tags, and use robots.txt files easily.
What more can you ask from a technical SEO automation tool?