I’ve been working in digital marketing for a while now, and honestly, automation is what keeps campaigns manageable at scale. For me, it started with simple things like automated reporting and rank tracking — saving hours every week that I used to spend pulling data manually.
In SEO, automation has been most helpful with things like technical audits, internal link mapping, and keyword clustering — tasks that used to eat up entire days. But I’ve learned you can’t just take the outputs at face value. Automated tools often surface too many “issues” or keyword groups that don’t make strategic sense, so you still need to filter and prioritize manually.
What’s been most useful lately is lifecycle automation — setting up email and SMS flows based on customer behavior instead of sending blasts on a schedule. It feels more personal to the customer and takes pressure off the team.
I work with the SEO team at Dignitas Digital, and across clients we’ve seen that automation doesn’t replace strategy — it just frees up time to focus on the bigger moves. That’s the part I think a lot of people miss.