The world of SEO is highly competitive. Everyone wants to get ahead in this race. However, you are bound to fall behind if the content that you share on social media is not competitive enough in terms of quality.
However, it all boils down to the content ranking. There can be many reasons why your content is ranking lower than your competitions ranging from the built-in audience to domain authority.
While certain things cannot be helped at all, there are certain factors that you can use to turn content in your favor.
One of the most widely used and effective ways of doing so is using a content scraper or a web scraper. You can use a web scraper to collect data from the internet and use it to form insights into the work policies and techniques that your competition is using.
But all this said and done, you must know how to use these insights to achieve your business needs.
Let’s dive into the world of content scraping for more insight.
What is Content Scraping?
Contents
Content scraping refers to the practice of extracting data in bulk from various digital documents like XML and HTML files.
The data that you obtain using data scraping, you can use its various forms. You can understand the keywords working for the competition, content categories generating the highest audience, etc.
What are the ways to use Content Scraping for SEO?
Most of the SEO and digital marketing experts fail to use the data that they obtain from scraping. Here is a list of ways in which you can use content scraping for your SEO purpose.
1. Organic Keyword Ranking
Organic Keywords Ranking is one of the most popular ways of using content from your competitors’ websites. You can build insight based upon the keywords which your opponents are bidding on, the results that he is getting and their PPC strategies.
2. Check SERP rating
In the end, it all comes down to how your listings are doing on the SERPs. Using the web scraper, you can gain insights into the best performing categories of your competition. By knowing this, you can also modify your strategies to emphasize those categories as well.
3. Keyword search volume
Keyword search volume refers to the number of times a keyword is searched on the internet. By scraping the internet for the content, you can determine the keywords which have the highest probability of being typed into search engines.
Once you gain this information, you can plan your PPW campaign and keyword bidding appropriately. This will help you rank your content on the top of the search result. However, it is essential to note that different scrapers will give other numbers for the same keywords. So, it is crucial that you only use a reliable scraper for your purpose.
What are the things to Remember while Scraping the internet for Content?
While the world of content scraping has become a lot easier thanks to all the services and tools available, these tools are specially designed to make sure that you can achieve the desired results on the search engine rankings.
However, there are certain things that you must keep in mind. These tricks will help you get the content and data you need without any undue risk.
Choosing an SEO Proxy
Choosing an SEO proxy to browse the internet, especially when you want to do web scraping, is a good idea. A proxy server masks your residential proxies from the websites you are visiting. This prevents your IP address from getting tracked and lowers your chances of getting flagged or blocked from the website.
IP Rotation
The easiest way for the websites to determine that you are scrapping is to detect your IPs if you use the same IPs for conducting multiple web scrapings. This increases the probability of the websites flagging your residential proxies and hence the chances of you getting blocked.
To avoid getting blocked by the websites, you can use one of the proxy rotation services available out there or VPN to mask your residential proxy IP.
Headless browser
Different search engines are biased towards specific web browsers because of the additional support and dynamics. For example, if you use an advanced browser with special capabilities, the search engine is more prone to show your better and richer content.
To scrape websites that rely on the Javascript code, your scraper must be undetectable. For this, you can use a headless browser to do the job.
Conclusion
In case you are wondering what your opponent is doing right always to get the top spot in the SERPs, you need to consider content scraping to get actionable insights. However, make sure that you keep these tricks in your mind before you begin doing it to gain a competitive edge over your competition.
You can choose to use a headless browser, use SEO proxy servers, or simply use a VPN to mask your identity. However, whatever you decide to do, make sure to do it correctly.