How To Beat Your Competition Using Only SERPs
This post was sponsored by Bright Data. The opinions expressed in this article are those of Sponsor.
Wondering how you can easily beat your competition without adding another tool to your marketing stack?
The answers to how your competition is beating you are available to you for free.
Where? As?
In SERP data on SERPs.
What is a SERP and how does it help me beat my competitors?
Search engine results pages (SERPs) are the results that appear when you search for something on search engines like Google, Bing, and others.
SERP data is the information found in each individual result on the SERP.
This data is freely accessible, public web data that can help you improve and strengthen your position in search engines around the world.
You can pull SERP information from both paid and organic search results and get a full insight into what your competition is doing.
You can use SERPs to:
- Discover hidden trends.
- Improve paid advertising.
- Identify gaps in content.
- Understand how content performs by region.
But how can you easily find this information to improve your content?
Have it automatically collected by a SERP scraper.
Get the data instantly so you can start building your SEO strategy faster.
Easily gather free information about competitors with SERP scrapers
SERP Scraper or SERP AIs can easily and automatically collect SERP data from various search engines.
Long story short, there is a lot of great data to collect due to the various factors that affect a SERP such as: B. Location, search history and device.
These ever-growing factors continue to make it difficult to conduct manual SERP data collection.
With SERP scrapers, you no longer have to do this by hand.
Instead, these SERP AIs allow you to automate the data collection process, pulling web data from countless different sources simultaneously in real-time to collect large amounts of data.
In turn, as the job grows, you gain better insight into competitor research—and save time overall.
Automate competitor searches and free up bandwidth with SERP scrapers
To fully automate SERP data collection, companies run their SERP scrapers over public web data collection infrastructures.
SERP scraper automation can help you:
- Instantly see what SERP content is working for your competitors.
- Geotargeting requests from users to understand different targeting techniques.
- Understand SERP intent from all angles, right down to how a device meets users’ needs.
- Unlock content behind walls that block search engine bots, such as B. solving CAPTCHAs.
How to set up your own SERP scraper
Some companies create their own SERP scrapers from scratch, but this can be a time-consuming option.
Fortunately, there are other, faster options.
Use SERP APIs
Many web data providers offer SERP APIs that require little to no programming experience to collect web data from the results pages.
These tools are specifically designed to target all major search engines and automatically pull data from the results pages.
Once you’ve chosen your SERP scraper, it’s time to configure the AI and get access to free competitor data.
Configure your research parameters
With your SERP API dashboard, you can set the various parameters for search queries customized to your workflow and data needs.
You can choose specific parameters for your scraping, e.g. e.g.:
- geo targeting.
- language used.
- search filter.
- SERPs in safe mode.
- device used.
- SERP features like Maps, Shopping, Hotels, Flights, News, etc.
Increase SERP access
Similar to the data collection infrastructure, some SERP AI tools have unblocking technology that allows you to do your scraper search like a real person.
Your scraper should be able to bypass CAPTCHA checks to help you get the full competitor breakdown.
Set up automatic algorithm updates
The SERP API you choose should be able to make updates when changes are made to the results page by the search engines.
This is especially helpful considering that changes are constantly being made to the structure and algorithms of SERPs, and new features are being added to these pages more and more frequently.
If your scraper is not up to date, it will either return inaccurate data or will not be able to read the page and provide the data requested by the request.
What to look out for when creating an internal SERP scraper
If you were to create a scraper in-house, you would have to manually update the scraper’s code periodically to ensure it matched the structure of the website.
However, if you use a SERP API developed by a web data provider, you don’t have to worry about this process.
Vendors typically monitor changes across all major search engines and update the scraper accordingly to ensure accurate and uninterrupted real-time data collection.
How to compile SERP data with a SERP Scraper – a simple example
Let’s say you want to collect public web data about a hotel—including prices, availability, reviews, and more.
How to do SERP research on hotel competitors by hand
If you were to research this SERP manually, Google Search and Google Travel are great tools to uncover free research and data.
- Enter the hotel name in Google search.
- Notice the first details in the resulting Knowledge Graph, such as: B. Ratings, specific arrival and departure dates and the number of guests.
- Compare prices to understand what competitive packages you can offer to compete.
- Discover the popularity of booking to drive your own campaigns and sales.
- Dive deeper manually and discover more data.
From here you can start building your strategy, which opens up more avenues to manually research more options and data points.
How to do SERP research on hotel competitors automatically
The SERP API allows you to do all of this automatically.
- Steps 1 – 5 are completed by SERP APIs and include new parameters like price comparison, dates, guest age, whether free cancellation is included and more to collect additional price combinations.
The competitor research is done for you so you can start developing your new strategy.
An example of what these searches would look like can be found here.
Make it easy for yourself: let us scrape SERPs for you
Basically, in today’s world, SERP data provides the building blocks and direction for digital marketers to improve their search engine rankings across the globe. Because of this, a large amount of public web data is required.
To automate this web scraping process, companies are using SERP scrapers developed by web data providers to pull accurate results from the web in real-time, which has vastly improved the manual process that gave rise to this task.
Overall, collecting large amounts of SERP data using web data providers is a much more manageable task than it was a few years ago, and now businesses can sit back and watch the data deluge in – saving time and effort in the long run and helping businesses focus on the to focus on what matters most: the insights.
For more information on how web data collection can help your business, visit bright data.
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