Internet users have grown by over a billion in the past few years, reaching more than 5 billion. Considering there are 8 billion people worldwide, that’s almost two-thirds of the entire population. Can you imagine the amount of data these users constantly share?
That data can be valuable to individuals and businesses, which have an ever-growing need for it in today’s digital world. They rely on various data from the internet to make informed business decisions, improve their product or service, stay ahead of new market trends and the competition, etc.
Many individuals and companies utilize web scrapers to gather enormous amounts of data, which makes these tools pretty valuable.
What are SERPs, and how is web scraping connected?
SERP stands for search engine results pages. These pages appear when you use various search engines like Google or Bing. You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying, “If it’s not on the first page of Google, it doesn’t exist.” The truth is we rarely visit the second page when searching for something.
It turns out there’s much more than just the first page of Google, and businesses use web scraping bots to improve their content to get to the first page. How many users would see their website if the content wasn’t on the first page? It’s a known fact that most of us only look at the first page.
Companies use web scraping or data extraction to extract massive amounts of data and improve their SEO ranking. They do it by pulling various data from different web pages and analyzing it so they can use it to improve their website or content visibility.
Why do companies scrape SERPs?
How can you use SERP data? Well, there are multiple use cases. However, the various reasons companies scrape SERPs boil down to a single thing: gaining an advantage over the competition. Nevertheless, here are some use cases of SERP data:
- Content analysis – Businesses can gain insight into what type of content works or does well by analyzing the types of content on SERPs. Furthermore, they can adjust their business strategies to improve SEO rankings.
- Keyword research – Similar to content, specific keywords bode well. Companies scrape SERPs for these particular keywords to gain insight into search volumes and user intent, which can improve their SEO rankings and content.
- Competitive analysis – Online businesses and companies often utilize and scrape SERPs to monitor their competition. If you’re doing better than the competition regarding search engine rankings, website, and content visibility, you can spend less money on improving products, services, or content.
- Price monitoring – Similar to competitive analysis, price monitoring means scraping SERPs for product or service prices. It includes the company’s product or service prices and their competitors’ prices. Businesses can then lower or increase their prices accordingly.
- Online reputation – Reputation is one of the most critical factors for succeeding in today’s digital business world. Negative feedback and unsatisfied customers can ruin a company, so companies scrape SERPs to respond quickly to this feedback and adjust accordingly.
- Ad campaigns – Companies can also use SERP scrapers to monitor their ads’ performance. Well-made ads will appear first on various search engines, and you’ve probably seen them before. If an ad isn’t doing great, businesses can adjust by analyzing SERP data and improving their return on investment.
A company would want to scrape SERPs for many reasons. Still, it all boils down to improving a product or service, optimizing prices, and improving visibility. As you know, businesses do that to stay competitive and gain an advantage.
Different SERP scrapers
As you’ve seen above, SERP scrapers deal with scraping data from search engines. However, since all of these search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu, are different, there are also various SERP scrapers you need to utilize for each search engine.
For example, Google Scraper API deals with Google’s unique features and algorithms, and using this scraper on different search engines would be unsuccessful. You would use Google Scraper API to deal with Google’s search results, news, images, and other data types. Google Scraper API can help you get real-time information on ads, hotel data, and different data types from Google. If you’re looking for a Google Scraper API for yourself, click here now.
Different search engines use different algorithms, ranking factors, and display formats. That’s why each search engine has a unique web scraper. Scraping Bing, Yandex, or Baidu would require specialized Bing Scraper, Yandex Scraper, and Baidu Scraper APIs, respectively.
Conclusion
Individuals and businesses use SERP scraping to stay competitive. It’s a mighty tool to help companies gain insights into their content and website visibility, track competition strategies and prices, and improve their reputation. As different search engines use different algorithms, it’s crucial to use specialized web scrapers for a specific search engine. It helps scrape data you can analyze and use to improve online strategies, create better products and services, and make better ads for those products and services.
