The data obtained through web scraping can help your enterprise in various ways. It doesn’t matter what niche your company specializes in; web harvesting collates info that can impact key business decisions.
Such decisions could be related to marketing, pricing, investing, and branding, among others. In this post, we’ll delve into how web scraping helps with SEO.
When we talk about SEO (search engine optimization), we’re referring to various measures you take to boost your websites’ visibility on SERPs. It’s important to note that SEO involves laborious, repetitive tasks such as keyword research and managing lists. Smart businesses systemize these tasks to improve efficiency. SERP scraping is a key step to SEO automation.
How does web scraping help with SEO?
Enables SEO Masters to Get Accurate Data Quickly
Any successful SEO strategy relies on data. That’s why webmasters spend a lot of time curating data and reading different reports. But they can only rely on accurate data to make relevant decisions.
Sometimes, it’s necessary to compare large volumes of information to obtain meaningful insights. Obtaining this amount of data is hard when using manual processes. This led to the invention of SEO tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz.
With these tools, you can monitor search engines and scrape info that could boost your SEO strategy. However, you are required to pay a subscription to enjoy the maximum power of an application. They can be expensive in the long term especially for startups and small businesses. This is where data scraping comes in.
There are different data extraction techniques and some come at no cost. For instance, if you know how to code, you could make a custom-made SERP scraper using open-source software. Web scrapers don’t work for SEO only. They are an all-in-one tool for automating data collection useful in various business aspects. Unlike SEO tools, web scraping APIs are scalable and can handle any new workload at no extra cost.
Helps in Tracking Search Engine Page Ranks
Web harvesting helps you understand how well your website ranks on Google. For instance, if you use a 3rd party Google search API, you could scrape different SERPs for business-specific KWs and monitor page ranks in real-time. The information you receive will also show you how your page rank compares with the competitors. You not only monitor website pages but also social media channels and forums to see how customers interact with your brand. With such insights, you can tweak your website’s content to appeal to your target audience and improve ranking.
Competitor Analysis
If you want to out-rank your competitors, consider keeping up with what they are doing. Data harvesting provides an effective way to track competitors’ online marketing campaigns. There’s a lot you can gain by studying data about your competition. For SEO purposes, start by comparing your KWs with theirs. Scrape data that can show you which keywords your peers are ranking for. It’s important to look at how they use those keywords and phrases within their content. This is easy when you have scraped the data and stored it in your computer to analyze at your pace. Use these insights to come up with super-quality web content for your site that can drive organic traffic from search engines.
Monitoring Trends
Ranking algorithms change now and then, thanks to the evolving internet ecosystem. Be on the lookout for updates and new data. Compare with old data to see if your KWs are affected by the new changes and how. Some web scrapers offer an option for gathering real-time data.
Unearths Suitable Guest Blogging Opportunities
Blogging on other people’s websites can improve your business’s online visibility. Businesses use guest blogging to build relationships, acquire backlinks, and improve their search results. But you need to guest blog with a business that has an audience that matches your niche. Their blogging styles and topics should match or complement your business. How do you know?
Scrape the web to find that information. It’s quicker and less hectic since you can compile the relevant info at ago. You also get ideas of the relevant topics to pitch to each website that you gather from this data.
Identify Performing Content Categories
By looking at the scraped data, you’ll discover content categories that seem to attract more readers than others. This tells you where to focus your energies to get better results. Create more content on popular categories and help search engines to show more of your pages in the top results.
It isn’t easy to find performing categories manually. But an automated SEO tool can quickly scan through your site and pull high-performing pages for you.
How to Scrape Google Data for SEO?
There are a couple of ways to scrape Google data, each of them, of course, have their own pros and cons. You can use manual methods such as copy/paste and commands like “export to Excel” to extract images, text, or links from a website to a spreadsheet.
However, browsing through the internet to collect information using only your keyboard and mouse is time-consuming and, to be fair, quite annoying.
To scrape Google SERP data quickly and with high accuracy, people now use automated methods and software known as data scrapers. A data scraper can be a simple browser add-on or a standalone program. For example, you can use a third-party scraping tool like SERPMaster – it delivers large amounts of SERP data valuable for your SEO strategy.
Conclusion
SEO automation provides quick and accurate results no matter the metrics you are interested in. Web scraping is one of those techniques you can include to streamline SEO processes. Nonetheless, have in mind that website data extraction is only helpful to your SEO if you implement the insights.
