An SEO company that starts automating more than they don't has given up on SEO and turned to spam-for-hire. So I think you're asking the wrong question.

Well providing a competitive analysis of your website/company is purely automated now a days by SEO companies. That is one big example.

Disclaimer: I work for an SEO agency.

Scaling is a challenging thing, but as with any other company it depends on the growth of the company itself. If the company is not gaining clients then there is no real need to grow. But let's assume that the company is growing and gaining clients at a brisk pace.

How to scale: Finding people who are actually qualified in SEO is tough. Each firm does things differently (White Hat vs Black Hat). The best way to over come this dearth in talent, is to actually train people who want to learn and have a passion for SEO. If you time it right you will have a cycle going so that once the pupil turns to master there will be sufficient clients for that person to handle on their own.

While they are in training you are able to pass on the tasks that take a lot of time and are less client facing (implementation, link building, report generation, etc).

This allows your master to spend time developing the strategy and training the student.

Automation: There are tons of tools to help in various aspects. As for the program you mention, stay away. That is unless you want to see short term results and unhappy clients. The true gains in automation come from not building out crappy links, but by increasing your ability to produce meaningful results thru efficiency gains of repetitive tasks. While that program helps you do that in the short term, it is not a long term solution.

An example of a true gain would be as simple as automating your reporting and monitoring of the various signals that are important in SEO.

As a side note, some of those Large SEO companies who do what you say, may not be so large ;). They may be doing that because either they limited resources or don't know how to do it the right way.

Ross Hudgens (who's one of the best white-hat/grey-hat link guys) wrote a great post on this topic - http://www.rosshudgens.com/link-brokers-can-rule-the-interne...

the art of scaling SEO for a company is to make SEOs superfluous. there are a sh*tload of activities a company does anyway (marketing, biz dev, product development, q&a, ...) - all these parts of a company, all activities of a company can be SEO optimized. if the companies scales its activities, so their SEO efforts scale.

in theory very easy, the hard part is to make it happen. so you basically need someone who is half psychopath/sociopath, the other half consultant.

if you are interested, google me.

I was recently told about an SEO firm near me that has a farm of college kids sitting in cubes creating fake blogs and content to create back links. Talk about scaling out.

I've noticed a lot of companies have started doing that.

Some have automated software that finds good targeted domains purchases them, auto populates content, and then pays freelancers to create relevant articles. Octante360 did a good job of it.

How? Not well. SEO is in the service industry. Someone needs to do something to get paid. If you want scalability, build a product that people need.

I know of SEO companies who have an army of laborers working for $4 a day in India. They build thousands of fake blogs and link farms.