python seo

How to Get Started With Python for SEO

Python is among the most powerful open-source scripting languages that have many benefits for SEO professionals. Yes, you read it right, not just developers, SEO executives can actually get a lot of things done with this language. If you are also interested in knowing how Python can boost your SEO Services, this blog is for you. After listening to this for the first time, it might feel overwhelming as we as SEO executives hardly deal with writing codes. But, after reading this post, you will also get to know how you can automate some time-consuming SEO tasks and save more time for important work. 

Python language has the sheer ability to automate tasks that are repetitive in nature and they possess no risk when automated. This language also lets you function in a more efficient manner and process large sets of data with higher speed and error-free manner. Let’s get started with some basic Python executions that will help you streamline your SEO services. 

What you will actually need to get started with Python for SEO:

Python is a less resource-intensive scripting language as compared to other languages. First, you will need some data sets for analyzing with this technology. The SEO data may include the site’s crawl data, Google Search Console’s data, or Analytics data files.

After this, you will need an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) as it will help you run your scripts (code). We suggest using Jupyter Notebook or Google Colab as both are easy to use. 

1. Libraries available for SEO

Following are the libraries that are quite helpful for SEO professionals who are planning to leverage this platform for easing the SEO tasks:

Pandas Library

Pandas is a helpful library that is used for data management and manipulation of table data. This library will let you perform high-level manipulation in which Data Frame is the key data structure. For simple understanding, Data Frames are like an excel in which you can automate various operations. These Data Frames are quite more efficient than the traditional row and column operations. 

Requests Library

If you are going to perform a long-haul operation related to the links then the Requests library will be quite useful for you. With this library, you can make HTTP requests in bulk, this can be useful in your SEO strategy where you are planning to perform some action on all HTTP requests. The best part is that you can replicate a search engine bot to know how the bot crawls the pages of your site.

Beautiful Soup Library

Don’t go by its name, this library is useful when you have to extract large data sets from XML and HTML files. If you need to perform web scraping and need to convert HTML files into Python objects, the Beautiful Soap library will be very useful for that purpose.  

2. Segmentation of pages

If you are working on a large site which is having a lot of pages and you want to categorize, Python could be very useful. Based on URL structures, you can sort the bulk URLs very efficiently as compared to traditional with this library, you can run a certain function in a loop to capture URLs with a specific category. 

3. Redirection relevancy 

Redirects are an important part of SEO and Python could play a life-saving role in assuring the redirects are mapped properly. With Python, you can check in bulk if all the redirects that have been performed are mapped correctly and working fine. This feature of the Python library could save you a lot of time in finding the redirection errors manually. 

4. Site’s visibility benchmarking 

Checking the visibility of your website’s keywords against competitors is a common SEO activity and there are many auditing tools like SEMRush to perform it. Such audits help in finding the gaps in your keyword strategy as compared to the competitor’s site. But, in the condition when there are a lot of non-branded keywords, the tools will take significant time and you can’t just wait for it this much. 

To solve this issue, Python lets you create scripts and complete the audits with a large set of keywords within hours. You only need to make the script once and you can run it multiple times and it will gather all the important data in an automated way. 

5. Check broken pages

The last but very important feature of Python that will make the life of any SEO executive’s life easier is checking broken links. If you are working on a large site that has hundreds of pages and the site ranks for thousands of pages, in that case, if a link breaks, it becomes difficult to detect and manage it manually. 

On the other hand, you can streamline your link audit operation by using Python’s pylinkvalidator library. This simple library will find all the broken links and make your task easier. 

These were the basic yet useful tasks that you can perform with Python and make your SEO tasks automated to save more time. Boost your SEO with Python and if you have not used any of the features yet, then it’s the right time to get started. 

About Author – 

With over 13 years of experience as a leader in digital marketing, Mansi Rana is Managing Director of EZ Rankings. Passionate about all things data; providing actionable business intelligence in digital, future tech; and venture bubbles categories for everyone, everywhere.