SEO Hacks: How To Boost Your Rankings With Web Scraping

Life hacks are the best. Conventional wisdom tells us to avoid shortcuts, but deep down, we all want easier ways to do things. Now, I might not know an easier way to make people like you or be the next Elon Musk. Still, I know some ways you can make your business stand out in your industry and permanently claim a first-page position on any Google search related to your business. These ways are SEO hacks that help you bypass the tedium of manually optimizing every aspect of your online presence. Even better, I know of a one-size-fits-all hack that can take your SEO to the next level with minimal effort. I’m talking about web scraping.

Search Engine Optimization is a concept that requires data collection of keywords that will have you on the debut page on your business-related Google search. SEO data is mostly referred to as small data because it is for a specific requirement, and it is mainly needed for short-term decisions. However, small data is relative. The requirements of SEO for startups and businesses and the data required to fulfill them are always changing. Therefore, you need a way to keep up with them. Investing in web scraping is a fast, affordable, and easy way to do this. In this article, we’ll discuss why web scraping is an invaluable tool in your SEO arsenal. We’ll also take a look at some of the easiest ways you can apply web scraping as an SEO hack. Feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the section that most interests you.

Table of Contents

Before We Talk About SEO Hacks…

Before we talk about how you can use web scraping to aid your SEO efforts, let’s define what web scraping is and how it works. Now, I bet you’ve done a Google search before (and if you haven’t, I have no words for you, lol). Say perhaps: you are trying to check the price of particularly nice-looking heels you’d like to get your wife for Valentine’s. So you do a Google search, and you take prices from Amazon and Alibaba, compare the prices, compare delivery dates, and finally choose where to buy from. What you have just done here is web scraping. At the basic level, web scraping is simply the act of collecting data from the internet. However, with the limited time and energy available to us as humans, manually scraping data in large volumes like what you need to build a good SEO strategy is beyond us (unless you are the Terminator). This is where web scraping bots come in.

Web scraping bots help collect data at the macro level by parsing through given web pages or data locations and tagging datasets according to some preset parameters. Data extractors then collect the tagged data and download it into a usable format like a spreadsheet file. This is a classic case of combining the strengths of humans and machines to make our lives easier. Bots don’t get tired; we do. We know the data we want; bots don’t. You tell the bots the data you need, and it collects it for as long as you want.

While there are a lot of technicalities involved, this, basically, is how web scraping works. Now let us take a look at how this wonderful melding of human and bot capabilities qualifies as one of the best SEO hacks ever.

Why Web Scraping Can Help You Get the Fastest SEO Results

Contrary to what some ‘experts’ would have you believe, SEO does not have cut-and-dry rules. There is no plug-and-play method to SEO success. This is mostly because search engines are always updating their algorithms. And with every new algorithm update comes new guidelines to follow if you want to rank high. However, one thing that cuts across algorithm updates and guideline changes is the need for data. This is what makes web scraping so prominent among SEO hacks. SEO used to be a game of keywords. The more keywords you stuff in your content, the better you rank. Now, there are so many moving parts that you need to keep an eye on. Right out from building a strategy, you need data on keywords, competitor rankings, consumer content preferences, link building data, etc. When you start to implement your strategy, you need to collect data to measure how well your efforts to use SEO for growth is yielding results. And if they aren’t working, you need data to find out why.

One of the major benefits of web scraping is that it allows you to collect data in large volumes. While SEO data counts as small data, it is still large enough to cause you quite some headaches if you choose to collect it manually (small data is relative). With scraping bots, you gain the ability to collect as much data as you want at the click of a button, leaving you to focus on how to use the data. Web scraping bots also allow you to collect data in real-time. Real-time data is essential to get the fastest SEO results. Datasets like the number of clickthroughs and volume of organic traffic tell you if you are getting noticed on search engines or not. And these datasets are continually changing. Web scraping bots use API technology to allow you to keep up with such fluctuating datasets.

How To Use Web Scraping in SEO for Startups and Businesses

Know how people use innovations to break bounds and bridge the gap between business and technology? Well, SEO hacks do that, too, by linking content with business needs. There are so many benefits of SEO data analysis for your business. Here are five useful tips on how to use web scraping to perform SEO hacks:

●    Additional data for your content 

Being able to extract data from multiple sources with automated programs saves time and leaves you with more data and enough time to create unique content. The more data you have, the easier it is to generate something completely different and new. In most cases, stating facts gotten from reports or product descriptions regarding your content title increases the quality.

Imagine if you wanted to create a listicle blog content. You would need content from as many sites as possible till you get enough information about your list. For something like that, copying from individual sites would be a long process, and ultimately, not leave enough time to come up with the article.

With web scraping, you can type in the topics you need data about and ask the scraping bot to extract articles containing these topics from a Google search page. This way, you would get more data and, at the same time, avoid the data not related to what you need. Most people (including you and I) don’t go beyond the second page when searching on Google. Web scraping bots can go all the way to the last page. There is a low chance of finding what you are looking for that far back, but sometimes we find gold in the mud.

●    Crawl organic keyword search results 

Keywords are the most significant SEO element. It doesn’t matter how high your website is ranking. If you are ranking for the wrong keywords, you won’t make a dime. Therefore, before you even start building any SEO strategy, you need to identify the right keywords to rank for. The optimum keyword is one the has a high search volume with low competition. So, where do you find your keywords? From your competitors!!! And Google. This brings us to web scraping. The easiest way to know the keywords your competitors are ranking for is to scrape Google rankings data.

The more you know, the better-informed decisions you can make regarding the curation of your content. You can as well scrape keywords research sites if that is the only data you need. Some websites produce other keywords that you can use for your article when you type in the blog title. Examples are keywordtool.io and SEMRush.

●    Knowing your high-performing contents 

It is essential to know your content so you can determine the ones that are performing best. The reason for this method is because there is usually a pattern that reveals why those contents are doing well.

You can also use the metrics to know what you are doing right regarding those contents and perhaps let your contents revolve around that category. Web scraping is an excellent tool for extracting metrics data from your blog. It extracts all your top content and gives you insight into how to keep curating content that resonates with your audience.

●    Discover industry influencers 

One of the most relevant social media marketing strategies is to partner with influencers on the specific platform. Collaborating with industry influencers by posting content on their website and running a backlink to your website is an effective way to increase your search rank on Google. However, discovering these influencers isn’t an easy job.

With web scraping, you can scrape similar sites to your relevant hashtags in your niche or blog comments. The influencer doesn’t have to be the best in the field, as you could also employ micro-influencers who are good at what they do. Use a gentle approach while pitching your blog so you don’t come off too strong.

●    Create backlinks on forums 

Another way to improve your search engine optimization is to create backlinks to your site. How do you create backlinks? Well, it is easy. Firstly, you have to be in forums where they talk about your niche. When people ask questions regarding your industry, you respond to the problems with solutions and subtly include your link to a relevant article.

After explaining your answer, you can add something like “you can more where I talk about it here: XYZ.xyz” in the same comment. By utilizing web scraping, you can discover all the forums in which they are discussing topics related to your field.

Using Scraping Robot To Build an SEO Business Plan

If you’ve gotten to this point, then all that’s left is to find the right scraping tool to help you build a solid SEO business plan. Well, you are in luck. Using Scraping Robot as your tool for SEO hacks is the move you need to step-up your SEO game to level infinity.

To start scraping SEO data at scale, all you have to do is send us a message telling us what you want, and we’ll get started creating your custom scraping solution for you. We delight in collaborating with our customers to develop unique scraping solutions that blow all of our minds.

All the data scraped with our service is delivered to you in a CSV format for easy use. If you are into DIY and you’d like to try out our already-built modules by yourself for free, check out our modules page.

All our web scraping modules use APIs to enable you to automate your web scraping process and collect data in real-time. We also use multiple proxies, allowing you to send an unlimited number of scraping requests simultaneously.

Conclusion

Gold and silver I have not, but I know of a way to make your SEO efforts better than they have ever been. SEO hacks abound, all of them useful, but none of them so versatile as web scraping. Web scraping is and remains the ultimate among SEO hacks for big data. Scraping Robot is the ultimate scraping service. Send us a message and let us help boost your rankings.

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Saheed Opeyemi