We all know how important online marketing is, nowadays. During the last decades, the online realm has become more and more prevalent in every business’ plans to expand and increase their revenues. Especially since the COVID pandemic has taken a hold of our world, this part of a business has become more and more significant and more companies went online.
If you want to make an assumption of the growth the online can generate, just take a look at Amazon’s Stock Price and its growth during the last year. You will get a good picture on the endless possibilities of the online realm. Whether you are running a bricks and clicks or a brick and mortar business looking to create a new source of income or to expand an existing one, as you might already know, in the online realm, SEO is one of the most important aspects.
It’s all about making it to the top spots of the search engines, so potential clients who are looking for a service or a product you are selling, will enter your website and have a look. Who knows, maybe they even become your customers.
A very important aspect when talking about online marketing is automation. By that, we talk about automating online campaigns, automating SEO, automating emails, and so on. Now, let’s focus on our subject SEO. Here’s how you can easily automate SEO using
Python, a very easy to learn programming languages. But first, why Python?
1. Why Python for SEO
Python is a very popular language because it has a very mild learning curve. This means that, while learning it, you won’t feel overwhelmed by the information you need to retain in order to be able to create functional applications. Its syntax is very easy to learn, the concepts behind Python are widely used, they are not very intricate and you can easily find more information about them online. Everything is just a click away.
Apart from that, Python is very versatile, meaning that you can implement it in various applications and implementations.
2. Competition Research
Once you do some digging and identify your main competitors and their websites, you can start researching their websites from a technical point of view. Python is a very good programming language for creating web scrapers, which will help you do that technical research. By technical, we refer to SEO, of course.
What a scrapper does is go through a website and read everything about it. It identifies the HTML elements and their content. Then, the scrapper looks after the alt tags and meta tags they use and the inner content of the HTML elements, be it text or image.
If we are talking about text, a scrapper could easily identify the keywords a website is focusing on and their density.
Then, you can compare those keywords to the most efficient and see if your competition is doing a good job. If they are, then use some of their tactics, if not, improve them>/p>
3. Generate Alt Attributes for Images
As you might already know, search engines use scrappers similar to the one we’ve been talking about earlier in order to categorize and rank your website.
The tricky thing is that these scrappers can actually interpret images, for them it’s just an < img > HTML element containing a link.
With Python, you could create a small tool which will add the needed alt tags and meta tags to your image. This way, the search engines’ scrappers will be able to know what an image actually contains and they will be able to rank your website more precisely.
4. Determine Inconsistencies in Your Website. 404: Not Found?
From a search engine’s point of view, a very big minus is a dead end in a website. The most “popular” are general errors such as the well known 404: Not Found or, even worse, errors generated by code execution. The last ones, not only will they generate a bad user experience, but they will also downgrade your search engine ranking.
You might have a killer website, but if it fails when your client visits it, he will definitely leave.
By creating test cases for your website, you can mock a user’s interaction with your website and easily find inconsistencies in its behavior. Thus, if your tests receive errors, you can identify their cause and fix them. This way, by the time it reaches the “Go Live” status, it will function properly and your SEO rank will go through the roof.
Tip! During the past years, Robot has become a very popular testing framework used by Python developers. You can use it to easily create end-to-end testing scenarios, from the home page, until the very last “Thank You!” page your customers visit after they’ve made their acquisition on your website. Make sure you try it before beginning to test your website, it will make your life much easier.
5. Constant Keyword Research
When you created your website two years ago, you did your homework, and you identified the most effective keywords.
Even so, since then, chances are, trends might have changed and other keywords might be more effective than the ones you’ve used. By using Python, you can create a small tool which will be integrated with
Google Keyword Planner. Then, on a regular basis, you can get automated reports with the latest keyword trends.
If you get the report regularly, once a week, you can also make use of Real Time Marketing and use keywords which have steep, but short lived visibility. Basically, you use trends to increase your website’s visibility.
6. Extra: Artificial Intelligence for Content Creation
For this, you will need to learn for quite some time to be able to create such a tool, but it will be worth it.
As you might have found out by now, Python is a very popular language due to its intense usage in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
By using the information received during the keyword research on point 5, you can create an AI tool which will generate small blog posts containing the most popular keywords. The tool will learn how to interpret this data, then it will learn how to make it as effective as possible: keyword placement (is it in the title, in the body of the blog post?), keyword density, and much more.
Then, it will use this information in order to create basic blog posts which will improve your SEO rank. As said before, this is not meant for beginners, you will need to master Python perfectly before even trying to do something like this, but if you manage to do it, you won’t have to worry about SEO.
Conclusion
As we already said, Python is a very good language for automating SEO tasks. You can easily create tools which you can use to research your competition’s online presence, improve your website’s SEO, improve the quality of your website from a technical point of view, and do automatic research. So, what are you waiting for? If you don’t speak Python, start learning, if you do, start creating your first tool.