In today's highly competitive business environment, organisations must work smart to survive. But how can you be successful in such a competitive and challenging environment? It’s easy, you can deploy the best tactics and hire the best marketing and salespeople in the world. However, you'll probably still be inefficient.
A competitive market analysis is one of the most critical things to help your company grow exponentially and stay ahead of the competition. It gets difficult to succeed if you are unaware of your competitors' performance. Because of this, marketers habitually extract data from the internet through web scraping.
If you scrape your competitor’s website often, there is a good chance that your IP will get flagged. One of the most effective ways to scrape data is by using a proxy to hide your location and act as a gateway between you and the target website. To make it easier, residential proxies from Smartproxy come in handy.
Using proxies for SEO web scraping
When you use residential proxies for scraping, you appear to be visiting websites and social media platforms from multiple residential IPs, making you difficult to get identified. This makes it a stable and safe way to keep an eye on your competitor's SEO analysis.
The benefits mentioned below will make it easier for you to understand how residential proxies assist in web scraping to collect information for SEO competitor analysis.
Increased reliability
When you access the internet using a public IP address, websites tend to feed you inaccurate information that can throw you off track and damage your business. When employing a residential proxy for scraping, accurate data is delivered as it masks your identity and lets you scrape the website’s data secretly.
Expanded geo-targeting possibilities
Certain websites, search engines and social media platforms provide users with geo-specific information. Using an appropriate residential proxy for scraping these country restricted websites can be your best bet if you need geo-specific data for competitor analysis.
Increased volume of scraping
There's no way to tell if a website is being scraped programmatically. The more activity a scraper generates, the more likely it is to be tracked. Scrapers, for example, may access the same website frequently to reach pages that are not accessible, putting them at the stake of being identified and blacklisted. Proxies protect your identity and allow you to access the same website multiple times.
Protect yourself from blanket bans
Avoiding blanket bans is one of the reasons for utilising residential proxies for scraping web data. Blanket bans are restrictions imposed by some websites on an entire range of IP addresses. Using a proxy network helps avoid blanket bans, as the IPs appear to be from actual residences scattered across a specific country.
How can we benefit from scraping SEO techniques?
Competitive content analysis can provide you with numerous advantages. The key goal is to gather as much information as possible about your competitors' content strategy.
Get new ideas for your content
It is essential to examine the material of your peers for new ideas. Even if you have already planned out your content for the coming year, it's important to look at what your opponents have planned to see if there are any themes you might be missing. Proxies are a big support when it comes to scraping SEO data. Analyse how your competitors organise each piece of information, headings, graphics, etc. This all becomes easy with web scraping by using a residential proxy.
Scrape your competitor’s product line
To stay ahead in the industry, you will need to scrape your competitor's product line frequently. If you are analysing companies performing better than you and are considered industry giants in general, it will give you an edge over them. To scrape their product catalogues to see which products and categories are the best, the best technique is to use proxies.
Find out about their benefits, special features, and deals. Look for distinct trends in the goods that are working well and those that aren't. Proxies help you in scraping all the relevant details.
Evaluate their SEO strategy
The success of any business's online performance and ranking is dependent on its SEO strategy. In order to optimise your website, you must first figure out how your competitors boost their SEO. Thus, it becomes almost a necessity to examine competitors' SEO strategies via web scraping.
After you've scraped all of the information that will help you figure out what works for your competitors, you can dive further to see things that you need to avoid.
Conclusion
In competitor research and analysis, data scraping is fundamental. You can't manually acquire such a large amount of data from the internet, so you'll need to employ web scraping to collect everything. All you need to do is protect your identity by using a residential proxy for promised results.