The internet has become a vast playground for modern companies that utilize digital methods of conducting business. With thousands of gigabytes traveling through the web, businesses build their websites, online shops, and social media accounts to create an ever-growing presence on the web and outreach to new customers.
In the modern business environment, we observe different factors that stimulate progress in the market and help the best players outperform competitors. Before the development of information technologies, the most successful businesses maintained a stranglehold in their niche: reliable connections and superior resources left little wiggle room for newcomers to overtake the old-timers.
On the internet, the playing field is a bit more leveled. Smart technological solutions and full utilization of available public information make competitors more transparent. Tech-savvy companies that know how to harness the power from the abundance of data will find ways to capture the attention of new clients and give the most successful businesses a run for their money.
Discoverability is a necessary component of a thriving company. The popularity of successful brands reflects in their position in listing on the search engines. When a potential customer searches for a product, the keywords written in the query lead to the most popular companies that offer these products. Search engine positioning shows the discoverability of a company – a prime measurement for its success.
But these rules can be manipulated. In this article, we will discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO), its role in a business environment, and how the collection of public data can aid companies in SEO competitor analysis. Understanding complementary tools and knowing what a proxy is will help us better grasp the process of web scraping, what makes it efficient and how it assists in analyzing the SEO of other players in the market.
To learn more details about proxy servers, check out Smartproxy – a great proxy provider that offers educational blog articles for users that want to benefit from these servers. We will talk about them more as we dive deeper into web scraping and its role in web scraping for SEO competitor analysis.
Why is web scraping important for businesses?
The modern internet is built on the free movement of information. While some parts of data on the web repeat, collecting all the possible samples help us derive the most accurate conclusions that are useful for analysis.
Of course, valuable information can be obtained and processed by real users – we simply visit the website and go over the displayed information on the browser. However, when the amount of useful data gets overwhelming, we need technological solutions for automated collection and parsing of extracted information.
To achieve these goals, we use web scraping and parsing bots that go to chosen websites, download their HTML code, and run it through the parsing process to sort it into a readable format ready for analysis.
Companies use web scraping to get a fresh stream of public information and get a better understanding of their market and the entire digital business environment. Such tactics are usually employed to find advertisers for digital marketing campaigns or track competitors to monitor changes on their websites and gather price intelligence.
Having a clear vision of strategies employed by other players on the market helps businesses make rapid adjustments to stay ahead of the curve and outperform other companies.
How do we use web scraping for SEO?
We can identify the main competitors by web scraping search engines and their organic search results. This way, we can track successful companies and take a peek into their strategies to uncover which keywords they are using in their blogs to generate backlinks to the website and the presented products.
Businesses with the best discoverability will use the best keywords, allowing us to draw inspiration from their strategy. Companies that do not appear in the search can also be studied to avoid mistakes they are making.
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Don’t forget about proxy servers!
Web scraping is a pretty simple process. Most internet users with minimal programming knowledge can start writing code that automates information extraction. However, when we start targeting competitors and search engines that are sensitive to an unusual amount of data requests. An uncontrolled rate of connections can lead to the ban of your IP address. To avoid such dire consequences and eliminate threats to our network identity, never use your main IP – choose a proxy server instead.
Search engines are extremely sensitive towards web scrapers therefore if we want to continue web scraping for SEO competitor analysis, the assistance of legitimate proxy providers offers rotating proxy servers that cycle at selected intervals to avoid drawing suspicion to a single address.
Seek out business-oriented providers and compare their deals to find an offer with an affordable price that suits your workload. With great proxy IPs on your side, you can focus on improving your strategy instead of stressing over disruptive technicalities.