How to Use a SERP Scraper to Stay Ahead of the Competition

Not a day goes by without you querying a search engine website for answers to a question you might have, right? The reliability of the popular search engine platforms – Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and more – have made them a crucial part of our existence.

Notably, their utility extends to the business world as well. Here, businesses strive to rank on the first search engine results page (SERP) organically by employing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. According to research, results on the first page have the highest click-through rate (CTR). Relatedly, high CTR boosts potential customers’ awareness of your brand, which could translate to increased sales. Business owners use SERP scraper to continually maintain a high ranking and stay ahead of the competition.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization refers to using certain markers to improve your site’s ranking on search engines. Some of these markers include keywords, quality of the content, headings and structure, and more. Keywords are generated through keyword research.

Keyword research is a process that entails looking for and subsequently collecting search terms that potential website visitors type on search engines when they are searching for your content, services, or products. In addition to keyword research, you can use SEO monitoring. This involves tracking your site’s visibility and ranking on search engines with the aim of establishing how you can improve each of these elements. SEO monitoring also entails gathering information from your competition, especially if their sites rank higher than yours.

Search Engine Scraping

To successfully execute SEO monitoring and keyword research, you need to undertake search engine scraping. As the name suggests, search engine scraping is the automated collection of publicly available data from search engine platforms. This data includes meta descriptions, keywords used in titles, URLs, and any other helpful information. The information collected is considered useful as it helps companies generate more organic traffic by ranking higher on SERPs.

Importance of Search Engine Scraping

As mentioned earlier, a higher ranking is associated with greater traffic and brand awareness. Depending on your industry, this could significantly increase your conversions and sales revenue. Search engine scraping offers the following benefits:

  • Digital advertising: advertisers conduct this web scraping type to identify instances where their competitors have displayed their ads.
  • SEO monitoring.
  • Keyword research.
  • Shopping data such as pricing: to improve the user experience, search engines now natively display products, their prices, and ratings – through search engine scraping, you can easily collect this data without necessarily having to scrap the e-commerce sites from which they have been retrieved.
  • News scraping: search engines contain a news tab that lists the latest news items related to the search term; through search engine scraping, you can collect useful insights and emerging information about your industry.
  • Image scraping: extracting image data from search engines’ images tab helps you protect your brand (by identifying images of counterfeit products) and gathering image-oriented data that, once optimized for your site, will help with your SEO strategy and ranking.

It is worth pointing out that search engine scraping is conducted using specialized tools known as SERP scrapers.

What is a SERP Scraper

With a SERP scraper, such as the one by Oxylabs, you need not pay for some of the expensive SEO services offered by SEO-oriented platforms and websites. SERP scrapers, therefore, greatly simplify keyword research and SEO monitoring. For instance, they enable you to retrieve keyword suggestions directly from search engines.

At its core, a SERP scraper is a web scraping tool that performs a search on any search engine. Next, it retrieves all keywords the search engine has suggested, as well as the people also ask section. Lastly, it stores the data in a structured format, such as a .csv or Excel file for easy download. These steps, while few, capture numerous benefits of using a SERP Scraper.

Benefits of Using a SERP Scraper

Using a SERP scraper confers you with numerous advantages and benefits. These include:

  • Gives you 100% control of the keyword research and SEO monitoring process – it, therefore, eliminates reliance on third-party providers whose criteria you may not be familiar with.
  • Saves you the money you would otherwise have to spend to enlist their services.
  • Offers faster results because of the lack of an intermediary (service provider).
  • Provides accurate results.
  • Allows you to extend the web scraping efforts beyond keywords and SEO monitoring; for instance, you can extract data from various search engine pages such as images, news, and maps, to mention a few.

Conclusion

A SERP scraper is a specialized tool with which you can undertake search engine scraping. Extracting data from search engines offers numerous benefits and useful resources that, once integrated as part of your website’s SEO strategy, should help improve the ranking. With research showing that a higher ranking is associated with an equally high CTR, you only stand to benefit from using a SERP scraper. It lets you stay ahead of the competition.