How to Acquire Search Engine Intelligence Easily

In your quest for knowledge or simply out of curiosity, you have searched something on a search engine and probably clicked the first organic result shown on the search engine results page (SERP). Perhaps you may not have known that the site you clicked on became the first result because of search engine optimization (SEO) and not by chance.

SEO is an online marketing tool used by businesses to ensure their websites rank highly on SERPs, translating to more website visits and sales (conversions). It infuses many techniques, e.g., keywords, tables, bullet points, backlinks, and more, at the center of which is web scraping.

Web scraping

Web scraping, also known as web data harvesting or web data extraction, entails retrieving or collecting data from websites. When used to collect information on various SEO techniques, it involves extracting this data from SERPs. Typically, a website, which could be your competitor’s, ranks highly as an organic search result because it has optimized its content and web page title according to a particular keyword. To establish what this keyword or multiple keywords are, you have to harvest data from the SERP.

Of course, you can retrieve this data using manual methods, but it would be a time-consuming exercise as well as being inefficient. For the best results, you should deploy automatic web scraping tools, which, in turn, require SEO proxies. Otherwise, you are likely to face hurdles because large websites such as Google and Bing detest automation or the use of bots.

Challenges of web scraping

The challenges of web scraping include:

• Anti-scraping techniques
• Regularly-changing structure of a website
• Complicated web page structures

Anti-scraping techniques

The tools that make automated web scraping possible work by issuing multiple web requests to web servers requiring HTML documents to be sent for each of the website’s web pages. Needless to say, such requests are unhuman-like in the sense that a human user can only make a few requests at a time.

Web servers flag IP addresses responsible for making multiple requests since it automatically makes them bots based on the logic above. Upon flagging, they subsequently prompt the user to solve a CAPTCHA puzzle. If the user is a human being, they would easily solve it, but bots cannot. Fortunately, you can prevent IP blocking and the resultant CAPTCHA prompts with SEO proxies, as we’ll detail later.

Notably, IP blocking and CAPTCHAs are the most popular forms of anti-scraping tools. That said, there are several others, including sign-in and log-in requirements, using User-Agents (UA), honeypot traps, and AJAX. Collectively, these techniques constitute one of the challenges of web scraping.

The anti-scraping tools prevent data extraction in different ways. AJAX, for example, makes the content in a web page dynamic. E-commerce websites are notorious for using AJAX, which uses calls to prompt visitors to click a button for more information. It also enables infinite scrolling on the webpage. AJAX ensures that such a website is convenient for use by humans, but bots experience challenges.

On the other hand, honeypot traps include links that are invisible to humans but can be viewed by scrapers. Naturally, the bots will follow the link, which is, in reality, a trap that enables the website’s owner to collect data on the scraper and its IP address.

Regularly-changing and complicated website structure

Web scrapers are usually written based on the existing elements within a webpage. If these elements are changed regularly in order to improve the user interface and user experience or add new features, for example, the scraping tools will struggle. And that’s not all. The frequent changes complicate the code as the web scraper once knew it, eventually making the process of extracting data more complicated than it used to be.

The web scraper’s code should also be changed to solve the new problem, which creates another hurdle, especially for users who do not have a technical background. In fact, it makes it more expensive because it requires the hiring of a programmer if one was not part of the team from the start.

SEO proxies

An SEO proxy is any rotating proxy deployed when extracting data for search engine optimization purposes. Notably, a proxy server is an intermediary that hides a user’s computer’s IP address, assigns all web requests originating from this computer a new IP address, and subsequently sends these requests on behalf of the user. You can learn more here about SEO proxies and SEO monitoring in general.

For web scraping purposes, rotating proxies are the ideal type since they regularly change the assigned IP address after every few minutes or give each web request a unique IP address. Remember the logic websites use? The rotating SEO proxies ensure that the requests originating from web scrapers mimic human behavior, thereby making IP blocking unlikely. In this regard, they are an essential requirement if you wish to acquire search engine intelligence easily.

Web scraping the SERPs while using SEO proxies is, therefore, a surefire way of knowing the SEO techniques your competitors have used to be the top results.