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A complete guide to automating your SEO strategy with python

It’s obvious that the COVID-19 crisis forced many businesses in all sectors to go online. As a ripple effect, the competition for customers’ attention and opportunities has become tougher. This means a lot of digital marketers are finding it harder to stand out from the crowd. This is why businesses with automated systems now have an edge over those without them.

In this article, we show you a complete guide to automating your SEO strategy with Python. Let’s cut to the chase.

What Is Python?

Python is an open-source, object-oriented, high-level computer programming language that supports a massive community of developers. It’s a general-purpose language that’s increasingly becoming popular among many in the SEO community. You can use it to speed up repetitive SEO tasks without sacrificing results.

Python’s object-oriented approach is a blessing for many SEO consultants, especially those without a background in computer science. Its simple, easy-to-learn syntax is deduced on a line-by-line basis. Once you master each line independently, you’ll understand the complete script you’re looking to use. If you are looking for a good place to learn about this language, we highly recommend that you check out Python For Beginners online resource.

What SEO Tasks Can You Automate With Python?

The truth is, Python’s powerful scripts allow you to automate multiple SEO tasks needed to help you rank your site at the top of Google’s SERPs. Done manually, those tasks would usually take days, weeks, or even months—and can be boring in the long run.

The following are four of the most common SEO tasks that you can automate with Python:

SEO Auditing

A good example here is Seth Black’s Python SEO Analyzer script, which is an SEO tool that lets you analyze the structure of your website.  It crawls your site, checks words in its body, and provides an analysis of any technical SEO issues found. Examples of data it’ll display include the number of words, page titles, meta descriptions, and more.

Where applicable, this SEO analyzer warns you of any missing titles, meta descriptions and image alt text. You can then fill in any missing elements and improve your on-page SEO strategies. The script uses Python 3.6+, BeautifulSoup and urllib3 packages.

Link Status Auditing

Another way you can automate your SEO strategy is by using Pylinkvalidator script. This standalone, pure Python link validator crawls your website and examines your URL status codes. Not only does it report errors like 500 and 404, but it also downloads resources like images, scripts and stylesheets.  

You’ll need BeautifulSoup if you’re running Pylinkvalidator with Python 3.x version. However, BeautifulSoup won’t be necessary if you’re running a 2.x version, such as 2.6 or 2.7. For larger websites, you might also need to install additional libraries to speed up the crawling. For example, lxml will require C libraries to crawl HTML pages faster. 

Internal Link Analysis

You know how important internal links are when it comes to making your website more user-friendly. Internal link analysis can bring you positive SEO results without spending a dime on links.

NetworkX is a Python package that helps you understand your URL’s discoverability within a crawl. It also helps you understand the distribution of “link value” across the site, and how you can optimize that distribution for better visibility.

Combined with Pandas, matplotlib and Numpy, this script lets you create plots with Python and analyze the internal linking structure of your website. It’ll show you the URL’s depth, its internal in-link count and various other metrics like Link Score or Internal Page Rank. In other words, the script will display the internal linking possibilities for you to optimize them.

SEO Rank Tracking

Tracking random drops in keyword rankings is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. Manual keyword tracking can be time-consuming. Luckily, Python-based SEO automation platforms such as RankSense are a game changer in tackling these kinds of task for you. They give you insights into your site’s progress in real time.

All you need to do is pick relevant keywords for all your pages and enter them into the rank tracking tool. It’ll automatically show you any changes in your URL. For instance, this rank tracking tool will let you know if your URL has:

  • Increased its ranking
  • Decreased its ranking
  • Changed its position
  • Reached a ranking goal

You can set up RankSense to notify you of the above changes daily or weekly in content delivery network Cloudflare. That way, you can keep an eye on your SEO rankings and implement any recommendations it gives you. This is a great way to create an SEO strategy that brings in more traffic.

Time to Implement Python in Your SEO Game?

As you’ve just seen, Python offers immense potential in the world of SEO. There are plenty of scripts that you can use to automate your SEO strategy to achieve the best possible search results. Whether you’re looking to check your hreflang tags, canonicals, or robots.txt, there’s a Python script to make your life easier.

That being said, make sure you perform the necessary tweaks based on Python recommendations to achieve the desired Google ranking. From website content and metadata to embedded multimedia, small changes go a long way in kicking your online business experience a notch higher!

Written by CrazyLeaf Editorial

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