There's a lot of good SEO tools out there. MajesticSEO, (shameless plug coming up:) my competitor finding tool, (shameless friend's tool plug:) SEOgadget's keyword research tool and of course the SEOmoz tools.

However, all these came from scratching an itch that we had. In the case of SEOmoz, it was Rand's belief that it'd be better for SEOmoz to move away from consulting and into being a SaaS company, whilst also wanting to address the needs of the SEO community in terms of having a single, unified, world-class toolset. In my case, it was from looking around the office and seeing people spending silly amounts of time doing competitor research, and thinking it'd be better for me to spend some time fixing the problem, rather than having a persistent task DoS attack on our staff's time. For Rich, it was wanting a better keyword research tool.

But the real issue they all addressed was something simpler: time being wasted on non-optimally efficient tasks.

Tools Tools Everywhere

Every agency is unique, to some extent. This brings with it certain advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, there's great things about variety in the industry - it means you get great people like the guys at Distilled, doing amazing things and generally rocking.

However, the way they do business, is very different from how the agency that I used to run (Searchlight Digital) did things, and the agency I'm at now (Strategy Internet Marketing) do things. Why? Because we've got different business models, different employees, different processes, different clients, and are at different stages in terms of business development. So the tools that we need are different.

Don't get me wrong, there are certain tools every SEO agency should have, to facilitate the business of getting stuff done, but beyond that, there's things in your businesses that could be automated that you can't buy.

Working it Out

There's a process that we're going to quickly go through now, which will hopefully prove helpful when it comes to automating parts of your business practice. Firstly, write down all the tasks that occur from start to finish in the client lifecycle (if you're not an agency, read this as product development, marketing, whatever fits the bill for what you do).

With that list, note down by each process or procedure what's involved, plus a rough idea of how long it takes.

Now look at each of those and see what's involved. Is it data entry that could be better handled by a single form and a database? Is it analysis of something that's being done by a spreadsheet that could be more efficiently done by a script? Is it a process of looking things up that would be far faster if done by an algorithm?

There's not always a non-human solution for every problem - some things just do require human intervention. However, even in those cases, there's often parts of the problem that can be abstracted away to something automated.

These are the problems that you're not going to be able to fix with external tools, because they're fundamentally about how your business works. Sure, a competitor tool that works for us is probably going to work for most other SEO agencies, but it's not going to work for all of them, because some of them will do the research in different ways that works better for them, and thus whilst it might be a useful addon, it's not going to replace the systems they have in place already. And that's the point.

You're Unique, Just Like Everybody Else

There's not a magic button that you can buy that's going to save you hours a month. But there may be one that you can build. It's all about looking at the things that you as a business do with humans that you could do with a machine instead. If you don't have a programmer, get a freelancer or hire one. Assuming that you're automating things that are worth automating, the time that they'll save your company in the tools they develop will pay for their cost many times over.

Also, remember that automation takes the form of a tool, but the form of that tool is fluid - some tools will be programs, some will be videos for information delivery, some might be literature and textual resources... The important thing is that it's a write-once, read-many resource, not that it's code.

So to close this little missive off, here's a short list of things to look at in your business, to see if you could save some time:

• Data analysis
• Data-based reporting
• Product analysis
• Consumer research
• Product/services research
• Strategic & intelligence research
• Client management tasks (updating, reporting...)
• Client onboarding/training
• Employee onboarding/training
• Time expenditure analysis & flagging
• Prototyping & wireframing

If you've built any tools or resources that have helped your company, tell us about it below. I'll be checking in regularly to reply to all comments.