Web scraping involves automatically extracting data from websites. It can be a useful SEO technique for researching your competitors, identifying optimization opportunities, and keeping tabs on your own site's performance. Here's how to leverage web scraping for a few key SEO tasks.
Research Competitor Content
Web scrape your top competitors to analyze their on-page content and identify gaps or areas where you can create better, more useful content. Specifically, you can scrape and compare:
Look for common themes, popular keywords, and content types that perform well. Then create content that fills in the gaps and gives search engines what they want - useful, relevant information for searchers.
Track Keyword Rankings
Web scraping can automatically check keyword rankings for your important terms by extracting ranking data from search engine results pages (SERPs). Set up a scraper to run daily, weekly or monthly, logging your site's position for the keywords you care about most. This allows you to closely monitor SEO progress over time.
Monitor Backlinks and Referring Domains
Just as you can scrape SERPs for rankings, you can scrape your site's backlink profile pages on Majestic or Ahrefs. Extract data on new backlinks gained, referral URLs and root domains linking to you. Adding this information to a database allows you to quantify your link building efforts and make data-driven decisions about link acquisition.
The key with web scraping for SEO is automating repetitive tasks to uncover optimization insights. Approach it systematically, with specific goals for the data you want to extract. And make sure to follow ethical scraping best practices.