The nature of SEO makes it an extremely data intensive process and as much time if not more is often spent on gathering, processing and formatting data as on the actual analysis itself.
Countless man hours are wasted each day in needlessly performing manual tasks which could easily be turned into automated processes. As an example of the time saving potential, I wrote a blog post some time ago using running Chrome Lighthouse via command line scripts and the potential time savings. Below are some of the estimated based on the manual vs automated approach:
As shown in the example above, automating just one process can yield massive time savings as volumes scale up. I also spoke about the process of using command line scripts to improve efficiencies at the last Brighton SEO conference.
Some of the processes I have improved efficiency on in the past include the following:
- Running and processing Screaming Frog Data
- Manipulating CSV Data
- Running Lighthouse Reports
- Consuming REST API Data
- Scraping Web Page Data
- Formatting Excel Data and Running Macros
- Querying Databases and Exporting and Formatting Data
I have worked on scripting many different types of processes over the year and in one case was able to reduce a task that required 2 people full time 5 days a week to a process that took an hour each day to run with a single button click allowing the company to better allocate staff resources.
I offer consultancy to help identify opportunities for automation and to suggest appropriate methods. I can also create solutions for the examples above and work on bespoke requirements.
Comments About My Work
“I was speaking for the first time in Australia and wanted to personalise my content around Progressive Web Apps and performance metrics, to the Australian market. Mike automated a Lighthouse audit across the top 1,000 Aussie websites, looking at the speed-specific criteria, so that I could provide a speed benchmark across comparable criteria that would resonate with the audience.
This saved me hours and hour of work trying to figure this out myself and took a lot of the stress out of creating my speaking deck. Mike was fast, efficient and ahead of my deadline, so I’d definitely use him again for any similar data automation tasks.”
Nichola Stott – Owner of Erudite Agency
If you are interested in saving man hours and making your SEO (or other) processes more efficient and your business more profitable as a result then contact me for a quote.