I'm pretty excited about RankScience. SEO can have a huge effect but also be one of the hardest things to accurately measure; and it's an industry where there's a fair amount of dogma and waving dead chickens around.
"No one has solved automated SEO because SEO is a software problem that non-technical marketers are trying to solve."
Great pitch, but untrue. Most SEOs I've met at serious companies are almost always very technical people.
And this isn't a recent development, back in 2007 there was an SEO contest held to grab the keyword for "Greatest living american".
An SEO named Brandon Wirtz took the win(1) and the guy would fit any description as a very technical person previously having been the compressionist and technical lead for Microsoft's Merlin Lab.
SEO is, at its core, a technical puzzle with constantly changing parameters, and as a result attracts a lot of very talented technical people from diverse backgrounds to solve.
(1) http://www.adweek.com/lostremote/the-second-greatest-living-...
Companies of a certain scale can afford to have engineering teams focused on SEO, and they should! Most companies can't afford this, though, and the vast majority of people in the SEO industry are not technical.
Also, who's better at solving ever-changing puzzles with many variables: humans or software? : )
Especially this line makes me wonder:
> No one has solved automated SEO because SEO is a software problem
I thought SEO is a content and linking problem, not a software problem. I'm somewhat disillusioned after having lost keyword rankings to competitors with far inferior content software (hundreds of HTTP requests, 20s load time, MBs worth of junk) vs. my highly optimized website that loads in milliseconds even without AMP.