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Data is king! Someone somewhere has probably said this before, and now more than ever, this statement remains very much true. To generate data, many businesses are turning to different kinds of data extraction techniques, with web scraping being one of the top choice

Web scraping is a combination of multiple techniques for extracting data from websites. And with the right SEO web scraping strategy, you can blow your competition out of the water.

So, In this article, we’ll properly explain how this is possible and the numerous advantages that you stand to benefit from appling web scraping for SEO to your digital marketing.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

Digital Marketing vs SEO

Let’s start right off with a brief recap of what digital marketing is, and also establish what SEO is.

Digital marketing or online marketing is a modern marketing strategy that involves a lot of electronic, digital, and internet-based technology. It combines email marketing with social media marketing, web ads, content marketing, influencer marketing and other forms of digital adverts

If you’re not getting the picture, think YouTube and Facebook ads that you get on your smartphone, or that “annoying” newsletter email that’s been trying to get you to buy a product.

On the other hand, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a subset of digital marketing that specifically focuses on search engine results and how a website can rank higher amongst search engine results. SEO involves improving the visibility and quality of traffic to a website.

Why is good SEO important? Well, according to a study, over 25% of people click on the very first link of any search result, and only a mere 2.5% get to the 10th link; and that’s just on the first page. Most people don’t even bother visiting the second result page. In the end, we have thousands of websites, competing to be on the first page and rank highest on the page. This result can only be achieved with good SEO.

Web Scraping for SEO

The internet has billions of web pages. Now, imagine yourself manually searching and scrolling through those web pages to collate information that’s relevant to you! If that sounds tedious, well that is because it is. The good news is web scraping takes care of the collating process automatically.

At a surface level, web scraping is a combination of various automated techniques for fetching data from web pages in a structured format using web scraping tools.

Web scraping tools or web scrapers can crawl through select websites that you need information from, and get the exact information you need without you breaking a sweat. The collated data can then be compiled in a spreadsheet or database as needed. You can read more about web scraping in our beginner’s guide to web scraping.

But what is web scraping for SEO?

To be more specific, Web scraping for SEO or SEO web scraping involves collecting data from competitors’ websites or social media pages, analyzing the collated data, and generating SEO trends that you can then use to improve an organization’s digital marketing strategies.

With SEO web scraping, you or your team can conduct quick, indepth research on competing websites, especially in cases where tons of web pages need to be analyzed. SEO web scraping helps to collect important information on page ranking, keyword usage, relevant search terminology, and domain authority.

You can also use it to quickly identify problematic issues like dead or broken links, unoptimized pages, and web pages with huge bounce rates.

Legal Implications of SEO Scraping

Quick question, is it legal to carry out SEO scraping? Yes it is.

On a general note, SEO scraping is legal as long as it is done within the boundaries of a website’s terms and conditions. Responsible SEO web scraping respects websites’ resources and visitor experience. On the other hand, exploitative SEO scraping seeks to exploit web vulnerabilities and cause damage to websites.

So remember to take caution and avoid scraping sensitive information and copyright infringement when you’re web scraping for SEO.

How to gather SEO insights with Web Scraping

Let’s take a quick dive into how you can gather SEO insights with SEO web scraping:

1. Have specified scraping plans, target, and objectives

Before scraping the web, you need to have specified plans, targets and objectives for your SEO scraping. You need to ask some pertinent questions.

What SEO insights do you want to get from your web scraping?

• Which websites or competitors are you going to target?
• In what format is the collated information going to be recorded?
• Which web scraping tool are you going to use?
• Would you be running the scrapper onsite or on the cloud? How would the scraped data be exported and analyzed?
• Does the website have an API for easy scraping?

Does the website have anti-scraping protection? All these and more have to be determined before you start web scraping.

You also need to read the robots.txt file to understand a website's rules of engagement regarding web scraping.

2. Scrape the web

The next thing to do is to run your web scraping tool, scrape the web, and collect the necessary information and data that you need. You could use a web scraping tool like Beautiful Soup.

3. Export the compiled data

Once scraping is complete, the next step is to export the data from the scraping tool. Try to choose a suitable format for easy SEO analysis. It could be CSV, Excel sheet, JSON or even a database.

4. Analyze the data

Analyze the data from the web scraping tool and collect the necessary insights and keywords that you need. You might need to do some data cleaning before analyzing the data.

By the way, data cleaning involves deleting outliers, wrong information, and duplicate data. It also sometimes involve reformatting the data you got, to make it easier to analyze

5. Apply the results of your analysis or share them with relevant stakeholders

Now that you have the insights from your competitors, apply it! Act on the analyzed information you obtained from the SEO web scraping. Use it to refine your digital marketing campaigns.

Select some relevant keywords, and apply them to improve your web content and blog posts. You could also see some of your competitor's strategies and tweak them to fit your marketing strategies. Note that all this is only okay if you do not cross legal boundaries, or practice outright copyright infringement.

6. Evaluate the results

When you’re done with step 5, evaluate your digital marketing campaign results and make adjustments your campaigns as needed. Remember that you can only track growth if you have measurable metrics .

How to Improve Your Digital Marketing with Web Scraping

Asides gathering SEO insights and then making changes to your digital marketing strategies, how else does SEO web scraping improve your digital marketing ? Here are a few:

1. Identify market trends

A core use of SEO web scraping is identifying relevant keywords in web pages that show market trends.

To simplify this further, here's a quick example. A fashion outfit could use analysis from web scraping to identify the top trending clothing items and brands to sell.

There is also “keyword matching”. Keyword matching helps to identify complementary items and products that match with bad reviews or derogatory terms. This helps to identify products that aren’t the right market fit.

2. Create new SEO-optimized web content and refresh existing web content

With keywords you obtain from web scraping analysis, you can create new blog posts and web content to rank your web pages higher. You can also refresh your web content by adding new relevant keywords to them.

You can also keep track of competitors’ backlinks and metadata to optimize yours.

3. Attach relevant keywords, captions and hashtags to social media posts

Companies often make the mistake of reusing the same hashtags and keywords on their social media posts. This could lead to boring and repetitive social media posts that customers have become used to..

But with SEO web scraping, you can pinpoint trendy, relevant words for new captions, keywords, and hashtags for viral and effective digital marketing.

4. Track competitor offerings and pricing

Web scraping can help you track your competitor’s offerings and pricing in a rapid, tidy manner. Imagine yourself manually crawling through your competitor’s website to list every product and price, before typing them manually on an Excel sheet;tedious yes?

A web crawler will give you the same result in far less time and with less stress.

5. Study engagement rate and product demography fit

SEO scraping can help digital markets track engagement rates of social media posts and conduct demographic analysis of these posts. You can also analyze the social media follower demography of competing brands to finetune your digital marketing strategy.

6. Improve your email marketing campaign by scraping marketing emails

Digital marketers can create successful email campaigns by scraping email subject letters and campaigns for relevant information. You can also get a glimpse of open and click-through rates through the collected data.

These six are just a few of multiple ways that SEO web scraping could be beneficial to you and your digital marketing business.

Conclusion

In summary, web scraping for SEO purposes is a surefire way to increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing. It can help you gather relevant insights into your customer habits and competitor strategies, and it can also provide unique business perspective that you otherwise wouldn’t be aware of if you hadn’t scraped the web.

That said, you’ll need to use a combination of the right tools to get the best SEO scraping results. Tools like a great antidetect browser, and web scraper.

At first glance, it’s easy to see why you’d need a solid web scraper. But why do you need a great antidetect browser?

Well, some websites ban certain locations, IP addresses, and specific accounts or device types from accessing their websites. Other websites might require you to create an account before you can access certain sections to scrape them, and these individual accounts may come with restrictions.

Antidetect browsers will help you navigate these unique scenarios. And what better antidetect browser to recommend than the industry leading AdsPower!

With its top-level spoofing abilities and multi account management, AdsPower remains one of the best anti detect browsers for online marketers and businesses all around the world.

All in all, this article simply talks about how web scraping could be beneficial for SEO and Digital Marketing. To see how it could benefit other business sectors, visit our blog page.