Last updated - April 13, 2023
Businesses need to stay ahead of the competition lest they fade into obscurity. To do this, they must embrace technological tools that extract competitor information. It’s important to understand who your competitors are, their moves in the extremely competitive environment, and strategies to stay ahead. Then you can develop your own plan to outperform them.
Of course, there are multiple avenues from which you can start, but this article will focus on the importance of web scraping in search engine optimization (SEO) and why that’s a match made in heaven.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping primarily refers to the automated extraction of publicly available data from websites other than your own (third-party sites) using tools known as web scrapers. (The term can also refer to manual forms of data collection from websites, e.g., copying and pasting, but it’s rarely used in this context.) The web scrapers are designed to handle all the processes, including but not limited to:
- Sending HTTP/HTTPS requests; for example, the Python web scraping libraries offer access to all HTTP request methods;
- Receiving HTML responses from the web server;
- Rendering JavaScript-heavy web pages using integrated tools such as a headless browser or Selenium, a Python web scraping library;
- Parsing the HTML file of a rendered web page, which comprises unstructured data, to create a structured format of the data;
- Storing the converted data in JSON, CSV, or Excel files.
Over the years, web scraping has proven integral to online business operations. It facilitates competitor, price, and product monitoring. Assists with lead generation, brand reputation, product review site analysis, and more. Most importantly, it is an invaluable tool working with the growing importance of organic search. That is why web scraping is increasingly used in search engine optimization.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is the process of targeting unpaid traffic by enhancing the visibility and ranking of a website or particular web pages on search engine results pages (SERPs). The process aims to ensure a web page or site conforms with the known requirements of the search engine’s algorithm. In addition, it’s based on the implementation of certain known strategies, including keywords, the quality of the content, and a better user experience (e.g., the loading speed and structure of the pages and blog articles), among others.
In 2022, organic search emerged as the third best marketing channel ranked by effectiveness, after email marketing and paid search or ads. A recent study shows this trend has been a few years in the making. Therefore, it goes without saying that SEO is emerging as a formidable marketing tool as it helps companies improve their organic search rankings. However, carrying out an effective SEO strategy is nearly impossible without scraping the web.
Web Scraping Applications in SEO
Web scraping can help improve SEO performance in the following ways:
Keyword Research
A keyword is a term people enter into a search engine’s search bar as it best describes the content they’re looking for. Every topic has its own sets of keywords, and web scraping can be used to uncover what they are. Moreover, web scrapers can scour the websites of competitors who rank high on search engines to extract keywords used in their web pages.
You can improve web scraping and SEO by adding proxies to the mix. One way or another, almost all web scrapers use proxies for geo-targeting, concurrent downloads, and online privacy protection. By choosing a proxy service in a specific location, you can scrape their local keywords and volumes and get much more accurate information.
Google Rankings of Web Pages
You can also scrape data from search engines to establish how your website’s web pages rank on SERPs. This procedure will give you an idea of your SEO strategies’ performance and whether you need to improve them. It’s hard to understand why specific web pages are not ranking well, even though you have structured their content, taken good care of the front end, and maybe even got several high-quality backlinks.
You can scrape search engines to see what keywords rank above your web pages and identify the ones you lack. Moreover, maybe you got some backlinks, but they are of dubious quality. Google has a strict policy to hunt down backlink farms and push websites that use them lower in SERP. You can scrape the Internet to locate backlinks pointing to your domain and inspect them.
Competitor Analysis
Web scraping SERPs can also help you identify who your competitors are. Emerging on the first SERP takes consistent work, meaning no company can simply appear on this page overnight. Thus, uncovering competitors’ strategies to enhance their visibility on search engines will help you develop better strategies.
Once again, the keywords play a major role. For example, you and your competitors have several articles on the same topic, but they outperform you in all positions. You can scrape those web pages, extract their keywords, and compare them to yours. If the keywords are not the problem, maybe it’s backlinking? You can use a scraper to inspect their backlinking strategies.
Lastly, coupled with a proxy service, you can target foreign competitors’ web pages. Remember that the Internet is divided into geographical regions with different content availability. Some crucial information can be locked behind a geo-block, but you can access it via your scraper and use it for further research.
Content Inspiration
Let’s say you’re all out of ideas for your business blog. Instead of spending long hours going through Google to identify what others are writing about, you can automate this process to get more data quickly. Collecting publicly available web data also provides information on the best-ranking content and categories. You can get dozens, if not hundreds, of unique topics that are driving traffic to your competitors’ websites. Armed with this information, you can easily develop a content strategy that’ll rank high on SERPs.
Best Web Scraping Practices in SEO
It’s worth noting that while web data extraction provides numerous benefits, it’s not always successful. This is because of anti-scraping measures integrated into websites, including search engines. To overcome these problems, this is vital to implement the following best practices:
- Use rotating proxies, which regularly change your IP address, thus offering better anonymity;
- Utilize a headless browser or the Selenium Python web scraping library, both of which will help you render JavaScript-heavy websites;
- Deploy user agents and headers, which are files that contain information about your device; this will help prevent the search engines from flagging your web scraper as a bot.
- Mimic human browsing behavior.
Conclusions
Web scraping is an integral part of SEO. It helps uncover the right keywords, a webpage’s ranking, and competitors’ SEO strategies. It also offers insights into the best-ranking content. You will get a significant advantage over the competition if you master web scraping and structure your website according to the gathered data. Furthermore, you’ll get insights into your competitors’ strategies if they outperform you.
