Search engines use specific parameters to rank organic results on search engine results pages (SERPs) based on their relevance. Search engine optimization (SEO), therefore, is the process of including these parameters into your website’s content in order to optimize its visibility and subsequently ensure that the various search engines rank it as high as possible.
The mechanics of search engines and their ranking algorithms are quite broad. In fact, to prevent gaming the system, most of the information about the algorithms is not public. But this does not mean that SEO is done blindly. Knowledge exists on what your SEO campaign should involve, with some of the SEO techniques including keywords, updated content, links, improved user experience, well-designed mobile site, well-written meta description, and bullet points, to mention a few.
If your SEO campaign is to yield any notable results, it should be monitored. This article will detail what SEO monitoring is and its objectives. But first, we’ll discuss the benefits SEO brings businesses, which in essence necessitate SEO monitoring.
Importance of SEO for businesses
SEO is beneficial because of its underlying operating principles – it is mainly used to make a website more visible to the search engines’ crawlers and algorithms. This visibility subsequently generates more traffic to your website since, statistically, most people using search engines do not click the second SERP.
According to a study by Path Interactive involving 1,400 respondents, 75% of users rely on page one’s results. Further, 72% of these respondents rely on organic results, meaning that they do not click sponsored results. These two statistics indirectly point to the importance of SEO since it is responsible for increasing your website’s ranking as an organic search result.
SEO has the following benefits:
- It makes your website and brand authoritative, fostering trust and loyalty
- It increases your website’s ranking and visibility, translating to increased traffic
- It improves the visitors’ experience as a result of such SEO techniques as improving the load speeds and making the various web pages more responsive.
SEO monitoring
SEO monitoring refers to the process of tracking your SEO campaign in relation to the various techniques you have integrated into your website to gain insight into the activities or exact strategies that increase your site’s ranking and visibility and generate leads.
In the same breath, this process will also enable you to pinpoint outdated or broken links that the search engine could regard as spam links causing it not to rank a particular webpage. Simply put, SEO monitoring provides information on what works and what does not.
Moreover, it entails scrutinizing your competitors’ websites to identify aspects that make them rank highly. Through SEO monitoring, you can generate a list of the most relevant keywords for a particular topic, which you can subsequently use when writing new content for your website. Click here to learn more about SEO monitoring or read the text below.
Importance of SEO monitoring
SEO monitoring has the following benefits:
- It helps you identify outdated, broken, or non-existent links
- It provides insights into aspects of your SEO campaign that are working as well as those that are not
- It sheds light on your competitors’ SEO strategy
SEO monitoring is a form of web scraping. Notably, web scraping or web data harvesting is the use of automated tools/applications to extract data from websites. In this case, SEO monitoring involves scraping data on SEO techniques from your competitors’ websites and your own, too. However, websites use anti-scraping methods to stop any web scraping efforts, with IP blocking being the most common anti-scraping tool. That said, you can use SEO proxies to circumvent this problem.
Use of SEO proxies in SEO monitoring
As a form of web scraping, SEO monitoring entails making numerous requests to websites requesting HTML documents from which the scraping tool extracts data on SEO techniques. Notably, websites are designed for human users who can realistically make a few requests at a time. This means that any requests beyond what is considered normal will automatically be deemed as originating from bots.
Usually, the websites will flag the IP address responsible for the abnormal requests, and this is where SEO proxies come in. An SEO proxy is any rotating proxy server used in SEO monitoring applications.
A proxy server is an intermediary such as a computer or mobile phone through which web requests are routed before being directed to the target website. The proxy hides the original IP address and assigns the web requests a new IP address. While all types of proxies operate on this principle, not all are ideal for web scraping. For this application, you have to use rotating SEO proxies. A rotating SEO proxy either allocates each web request a unique IP address or changes the assigned IP address every few minutes. This way, the proxy avoids a situation whereby all requests emanate from the same IP address, which, as mentioned, can only lead to IP blocking.