It’s not a secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about tremendous changes in e-commerce today. So many people were forced to shop online during the lockdown/quarantine period. This increases the sales of e-commerce outlets like Amazon. Amazon’s net income reportedly increased to $6.3 billion in the third quarter of 2020. As the e-commerce market continues to flourish, the competition among e-retailers will only get tougher.

Data indeed lies in the heart of any business. To get ahead you have to work a mile in the shoes of an average search engine user. A search engine user garners pieces of information which is a composite of data.

For a more practical explanation. Let’s say you have an e-commerce outlet with a composition of different thousands of products. To stand a chance to compete with competitors in your industry. You have to ensure that your pricing is competitive as well. All these play out as the benefits of website crawler.

But How Will You do That?

By surveying your competitors’ websites and taking note of their pricing. Here’s where it gets interesting. If they also have thousands of diverse competitive products. It will be impracticable to carry out this survey without any automated process.

That’s Where Web Crawlers Are in Play

Web crawling is one of the potent ways of garnering information from various websites without any hassle. With web crawlers, you stand a chance to compete with the top dogs in your industry. Increasing your reach, your sales, and ensuring the growth of your business. But you must have a well-structured website that easily permits BOTS to crawl on your website.

However, before you can be included in the search engine, your content has to be stored and arranged in the course of the crawling process. This process is also known as indexing. Once this is done your page will be among the running pages to be displayed by the relevance of inquiries.

In a moment we will examine some of the benefits of Web Crawlers. But before we do that. It is important that you have a clear understanding of Web Crawling and how it works. Without any further ado, let’s get started. Shall we?

What are Web Crawlers?

Web crawlers simply refer to employing the use of software to obtain data either from various website pages or a couple of web pages. They are also known as a spider, spider bots, bots, robots, and many more. These names are somewhat descriptive in their functionalities. Which is crawling all over the World Wide Web to the index pages for search engines like Google.

However, search optimization engines do not randomly pinpoint sites subsisting on the net. It involves a process. I will try to explain the process in the best possible way comprehensible even readers that are not tech-savvy. To understand this process you have to know how the search engine works.

The search optimization engine has 3 basic functions namely:

• Crawling - This involves exploring the net for contents and going through each code of every found URL link. Here, the search engines send out a squad of robots to detect up to date contents. These contents could be in the form of a webpage, a video clip, a PDF document, or even an image file that is discovered by URL links. The crawling process is initiated by picking up and following a couple of web pages to find new URL links.
• Indexing - This is the storing and the arrangement of contents discovered in the course of the crawling process. Here, the search engines process and keep information in a database of all discovered contents that seem relevant to the searchers.
• Ranking - This function entails supplying every piece of content that is best relevant to a searcher’s inquiries. When a search is conducted, the search engines dig through for content that is highly relevant to solving searcher’s inquiries. The order in which these contents are arranged by relevance is known as ranking. However, it’s not a secret that the higher a website is ranked in terms of domain authority, the more relevant it is believed by the search engines employed during an inquiry.

Now that you know the basic functions we can now discuss how the process works, The programs are required crawling and indexing before they can be conveyed to the right pages for phrases and keyword search.

Every search engine comes with web crawlers (BOTS) that search through the internet for the indexing of web pages. The BOTS move swiftly from a web page to another looking through all the web pages and making duplicates of each of these pages. The duplicates are kept among other pages that have also been through the crawling process.

Although, there are some instances when the site will go through the crawling process but wouldn’t be indexed. This implies that the crawler was either bugged or delayed. However, they will be indeed in due course.

Improve Search Engine Rankings with All-in-One SEO Tool? Sign Up 14 Day Trial

Why Web Crawlers Is Important

Still wondering what the benefits of web crawlers are? The answer is right here!

By now you should know that your web content can be ranked in a search. You need to be indexed first and the BOTS has to constantly and successfully crawl your website. Any content that has not been indexed will not be found from any subsisting search engines. Just as I mentioned earlier the duplicates of your content have to be in the search engine before it can exist.

Although there are some hassle-free means of getting a website crawled a few times. But with a well-structured website, the crawling process will take place consistently. However, whenever you have new updates on your websites, you have to index your web pages again. This will ensure that it is ranked better. Any modification on your page to a large extent reflects quickly in the search engines. This can be advantageous to your site as the newness and date of the post are one major major ranking factor.

Consistency in the way the search crawl on a website is a significant factor in on-page SEO success. Therefore, you must have a well-structured site that permits the search engines to crawl your website frequently.

Example of Web Crawlers

While the most popular search engines all have Web Crawlers. The larger one possesses multiple Web Crawlers designed with specific focuses. For instance, the Google search engine possesses a main crawler known as Googlebot. Googlebot is the composition of both the desktop and the mobile crawlings.

However, the Google search engine has other BOTS like Googlebot images, Google BOTS Videos, AdsBots, and Googlebot News.

Below are other examples of Web Crawlers

• Bing BOTS
• DuckDuckBot
• Baiduspider
• Yandex BOT
• Exabot
• ogou Spider
• Alexa Crawler

Benefits of Web Crawlers

Now that you have full insight into the meaning of Web Crawlers. How it works and its importance. It is important to discuss some of the benefits of web crawlers. Most of these following are helpful especially for those in a competitive industry.

Keeping Tabs on Competitors

This can be of great advantage especially for those dealing with tough competition in their industry. Sun Tzu, the Chinese general cum military strategist, opined that “If you know your enemies and yourself, you’ll never be defeated” To thrive in your industry, you need to survey your competitors. You need to get wind of what’s working for them. Their pricing, marketing strategies, and all.

With Web Crawlers, you can extract data automatically from various competitors’ websites without any hassle. This provides you and your employees the opportunity to save time for other productive tasks. The fact that the data are automatically extracted gives you the benefit of having access to data of great volume.

If you have a sales team, product management team, or even the marketing team required to survey new products/services of competitors. Then you should consider Web Crawlers. It also gives the chance to review your pricing and ensure that they are competitive. With the extracted data you’ve acquired from various websites. You get to figure out the marketing strategies of your competitors.

Keeping Track With the Industry Trends

Staying informative with the trends in your industry is essential in building values and credibility. It also proves to the public that your company is promising. Business moguls understand the importance of catching up with the latest developments in their industry. Irrespective of the current state of your business, make time to stay informed. With access to a large volume of data from various sites. Web Crawlers provide you the opportunity to keep track of your industry trends.

Leads Generation

Talking about the benefits of web crawlers is very incomplete without talking about lead generation.

If you are running a business that depends on information extracted from your competitors’ websites to generate more revenues. Then you should consider Web Crawlers. It provides you faster access to this information. Thereby having a positive impact on your revenues.

Let’s say you have a company that provides job placement. You need to when companies are hiring to stay in business. You also need to reach out to these companies and help them fill vacant positions with competent candidates. To do this you need to chase leads from different social platforms like LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter, and other public job websites. You also need to find all new job postings and maybe the details about companies with vacant spots. With Web Crawlers, you can easily do this without any stress.

Help You Get a Wind of What Is Said About You and Your Competitors on Social Media

Do you ever wonder what is being said about your company on social media? Having this information at your fingertips is one of the benefits of web crawlers. Web Crawlers can help you get a wind of what is said about you on social media. Not only that. It helps keep track of comments posted by your clients on external websites.

Web Crawlers can help keep up with industry forums, news websites, and social media channels (Like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Quora, and many more). It helps get wind of what is being said about your company and your competitors.

This piece of information is indispensable to you and your marketing team. With this information, you get to know what you are doing right and what you are not. It also helps figure the perception of your customers about your brand and product.

Competitive Pricing

For some reason, you might be having difficulty with setting up prices for your products or services. It’s even much more difficult when you are having difficulty with the pricing of numerous products. But with Web Crawler, you can easily access your competitors’ pricing. Giving the chance to set up competitive pricing for your clients.

Target Listing

Web Crawlers allow you to come up with a target list of companies or individual contacts for all kinds of purposes. With Crawler, you can be accessible to information like phone numbers, address, email address, and all. It can also set up a list of targeted websites providing relevant company listings.

Suppliers Pricing and Availability

If you are in a line of business that involves buying from different suppliers. It’s more likely that you will be visiting your suppliers’ site frequently to compare and contrast availability, pricing, and other things. With Web Crawler, you can easily access and compare this information without visiting their various websites. This would not only save you stress and time. It will also make sure you don’t miss out on sweet deals.

Content Analysis and Curation

Content analysis and curation is another very important benefits of website crawlers. The Web crawlers can be employed to have a better understanding of user behavior by keeping track of user activity. Web Crawlers keep track of users' activity by scraping various data. Providing you a better understanding of their behavior.

Conclusion

When you have a well-structured site that gives easy access to search engines to crawl your site data consistently. It enables your content to get indexed, therefore establishing a successful SEO strategy. Furthermore, Making sure that your website is crawler-friendly, as well as user-friendly, is guaranteed to benefit your SEO! T J Donegan emphasized in his Tweet.

Marketing’s job is never done. It's about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day."" — Beth Comstock, Former CMO & Vice Chair, GE. Likewise, there's an endless list of benefits of website crawlers.

However, ultimately, a successful SEO strategy resulting in high google ranking and surfacing high up on search engine result pages SERPs is one of the major benefits of website crawlers.