Digital marketing has evolved a lot in recent years. It is not just using the right keywords and posting content consistently. A lot of new elements like technical SEO, local SEO, user experience, etc., now play a role in your marketing success.
New tools like website crawlers and logs analyzers are becoming necessary to maintain an edge over your competitors.
In this article, we will understand what are web crawlers, how a web crawler will help your digital marketing process, along with a short list of website crawler tools we recommend.
What is a web crawler?
A web crawler is a tool that collects content from the web to build a corpus for further analysis.
Web crawlers analyze keywords and hashtags, index the URLs and the content, rank webpages, check whether links and HTML files are updated, copy web pages, and open discovered URLs to crawl new sites. The collected data can be used for multiple purposes.
For example, the collected data can be accessed by a search engine(like Google) for finding specific content or, it can be evaluated to improve the quality of existing content.
How does a web crawler work?
It starts with one seed page, collects the content, extracts the data from that page, and finds other pages, and the whole process repeats.
Let’s see how using a web crawler can help your business with digital marketing.
How does a web crawler help with digital marketing?
Now that we have briefly discussed what web crawlers are, what they do, and how they do it, let’s take a look at how do they come in handy with digital marketing.
Finding potential leads
For example, let’s say that you are a B2B company that helps businesses create quality content. You need to know when other companies are looking to hire content writers so that you can approach them(one of the many ways you can find new clients). This information could be found on sites like LinkedIn or other job placement sites.
Imagine how long will it take for you to manually find those sites and get that valuable data, and the amount of stress you will go through. With a web crawler, the data will be available to you much faster and in a format, you can easily understand and use.
Conducting competitor analysis
Web crawlers are particularly helpful in getting tons of information about your competitors. Manually collecting your competitors’ data such as their pricing could be time-consuming, especially when you have a lot of them.
Your marketing, sales, and product development team can get a huge advantage with web crawlers. It will give you an opportunity to review what works for your competitors and what doesn’t so that you can apply the lessons to your business.
This is one of the best ways in which you can use a web crawler for digital marketing. You can use a web crawler for the following:
- Pricing: You can adjust your pricing to compete fiercely with your competitors.
- Offers: New deals or discounts for potential and existing customers.
- Content analysis: Learning what is working for your competitors and creating relevant content for your business.
- Product: Keep an eye on new features of your competitors and how they are received.
- Target audience: See what market segments you are missing out on.
- New competitors: New businesses are popping up at all times.
Keeping up with trends
Staying updated with relevant information regarding your vertical provides you with an edge over your competitors. With access to the latest information, you can understand what your current customers are in need of and what new segments you can target.
Web crawlers make this process easy and fast by collating lots of information in one place.
Getting real reviews of your brand and competitors
In reality, very few of your customers will care to give you detailed feedback. Even if they do, it could be a bit patronizing and won’t be of much value to you. With a web crawler, you can get comments, posts, and reviews on external websites and forums. Furthermore, you can also get reviews of your competitors as well.
The best part is, it will be genuine feedback! This is indispensable information for your marketing and product team. You will actually get to know what works for you and for your competitors.
Finding listicles and articles to get your name on
By using a web crawler, you can find out where your competitors are listed, and other listed websites on your vertical and their contact details. You can get listed on multiple sites that can get a lot of high-intent traffic to your website.
You can also track and find other blog articles, like comparison articles, to get your business mentioned.
Selecting better vendors
If you depend on any kind of third-party service provider for anything, you can easily do research while choosing one. Web crawlers will assist you in getting important details like pricing and service availability of multiple vendors for a particular service.
This comes in handy while choosing marketing tools or services.
Now that we have seen the utility of web crawlers in digital marketing, let’s see what are the best website crawlers you can choose from.
Best website crawlers for digital marketing
Choosing the right tool for your business’ marketing is one of the most important decisions you might make. It will decide the quality, quantity, and type of data collected, ease of use by the team, and integration with your existing process.
Below we have listed the best website crawlers that you can choose from.
JetOctopus
Features: JetOctopus provides visualized data for technical SEO audits. It requires no set-up, comes with a log analyzer that provides live data, and comes with free GA and GSC integrations.
It is easy to use and its dashboard will let you check your site’s health before you finish your morning coffee.
Pricing: $30/month with crawl 100k pages limit.
Semrush Site Audit
Features: It scans your site for 130+ types of technical SEO errors. SEMrush Site Audit also provides thematic reports on various parameters including international SEO. Additional features like automation of reports and task management make it a good choice.
Pricing: Custom pricing based on your needs.
OnCrawl
Features: Apart from a great technical SEO audit tool, the OnCrawl platform also has tools like a log analyzer and backlinks tracker. Its capacity to go through a large number of links and compare crawls is unmatched. It also provides customized, segmented data reports.
Pricing: Starts at 49 EUR/month with a monthly limit of 100k URLs.
DeepCrawl
Features: DeepCrawl provides customized reporting, analytics, and automation features, making it a great enterprise-level SEO audit and web crawling software. It provides a flexible API through which you can send data wherever you want to.
Pricing: Custom pricing based on your needs.
Screaming Frog
Features: Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider can do almost anything including JS rendering, GA integration, and generating XML sitemaps. They are one of the leaders in this vertical with their customer base including companies like Google and Amazon.
Pricing: The free version can crawl 500 web pages and the paid version costs 149.00 EUR/year with no crawl limits.
Of course, every crawler has its own advantages which need to be thoroughly gauged by your SEO and marketing teams to determine the best one for your needs.
Conclusion
Using a website crawler for digital marketing will give your business a much-needed boost. As you can see, a website crawler can help your business in multiple ways and proves to be a cost-effective solution. With it, you can readily gain more information about the industry you are in and your competitors.
Happy crawling!
Image: Depositphotos
This article, "6 Ways You Can Use a Website Crawler for Digital Marketing" was first published on Small Business Trends
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