An interesting debate has been happening at Search Engine Journal about whether SEO can be automated. One company is preparing to abandon the traditional creative marketing methods in favour of number crunching and in depth analytics while some commentors believe SEO is always going to be more about marketing than maths.

In the past I’ve worked with ecommerce sites that run very close to being automated. We tracked every single keyword and traffic source and could pull a report to show the exact Return On Investment that each PPC or banner ad campaign produced right down to the keyword level. Imagine if you knew that every visitor from a certain website or keyword was worth $x and could set your PPC campaigns up accordingly, the whole process of making money is simple once you can track down to this level.

The problems occur when sites try to migrate this approach over to organic listings. Some companies use the ROI calculations from PPC ads to decide which keywords are worth targeting but in practice it’s never quite as easy as it sounds.

This week SEOmoz has proved that offering SEO services is a scalable solution but a lot of people still feel that the art of SEO isn’t a very scalable product.

In reality some aspects of SEO will never be fully scalable or able to be automated but certain tasks such as linkbaiting and viral marketing are scalable to the nth degree. Creating an imaginative viral campaign can take hours or even days but the returns are unlimited.

What do you think? How scalable is your SEO campaign?

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