Technical search engine optimization (SEO) has become more sophisticated than it was a few years ago. The digital marketing realm is increasingly becoming more competitive, and to rub salt in the wound, Google keeps updating its search algorithms around 500-600 times a year.
For that reason, businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their technical SEO campaigns without sacrificing results. Enter Python, a powerful programming language that can solve your repetitive SEO tasks through automation.
In this article, we’ll look at areas where you can apply Python to your technical SEO strategies.
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What Is Python?
Python is an open-source programming language with a wide range of easy-to-read libraries and modules. It’s considered a universal language because it can be multi-paradigmatic or object-oriented in nature.
In essence, Python isn’t just a technology for writing code. This general-purpose programming language carries a development philosophy and can do everything, from data science to machine learning and more.
Python focuses on the principles of simplicity, speed and scalability. That is why it powers some of the world’s most popular applications from giant organizations including Google, YouTube, and Microsoft.
Can You Learn Python?
You’ll be surprised by how easy it is to learn Python, even if you don’t have a background in computer science. The learning curve is significantly less steep than in other languages, precisely because Python’s object-oriented approach supports code readability, clarity, and practicality.
Python comes with relatively basic syntax that aims to cooperate with programmers and improve their experience. The language’s syntax is interpreted line by line. Once you master each line separately, you’ll be able to understand the complete script you’re looking to deploy. Besides, there are plenty of free and paid online resources where you can learn everything about this language, including basics such as Python read file, strings and comments among others.
How Do You Run Python?
You can run Python scripts using a terminal, command line Integrated Development Environment (IDE), or cloud-based software options. While most systems come with Python pre-installed, these will most certainly be Python 2, an earlier version that depreciated in 2020.
Python 3 is designated a more stable release and is best run via cloud services such as Jupyter Notebooks and Google Colab. These cloud-based options are ideal for running Python 3 as they enable users to learn and test elements of code on a line-by-line basis.
More specifically, these provide a seamless learning experience for beginners. Furthermore, the cloud service provider is responsible for updating Python to the latest available version. As a result, you can rest easy knowing you’re using a more stable version all the time.
How Can You Use Python for SEO?
The possibilities for Python and SEO are endless. This language allows you to automate some repetitive, time-consuming and often low-level SEO tasks such as:
SEO Audit
Python scripts such as Seth Black’s SEO Analyzer can crawl your website and provide recommendations based on any general SEO related issues. SEO Analyzer is a versatile website crawler that evaluates the following:
- Word count
- Page title
- Meta description
- Keywords on-page
- Missing alt-text
You have the option to crawl your site from the homepage. Alternatively, if some of your pages aren’t linked from the homepage, you can supply the script with your sitemap in XML.
The script displays a series of data for every page crawled, including meta tags, description text, and the length of the page. It identifies missing SEO elements and generates suggestions to give you a clearer picture of your SEO problems.
Broken Link Checker
Google hates sites with broken links. When your internal or external links are broken, they increase bounce rate and hurt the user experience.
So, how do you perform a daily check of all links in your website? If your site is WordPress based, you can install the Broken Links Checker plugin for that purpose. But if you’re not using WordPress, a great Python script will work wonders.
Python makes it relatively easy to crawl your website and examine where internal and external links are present. It returns broken links so you can edit and improve them.
Detect Keyword Cannibalization
Google usually limits the number of times a website can rank for the same keyword phrase. Keyword cannibalization is a major problem on bigger websites.
To avoid keyword cannibalization issues, it pays to shake things up a little. You could combine Python with Pandas and the Google Search Console API to evaluate the amount of keyword cannibalization across your pages.
These tools will extract data on the number of keywords being ranked for each URL. You’ll then be able to identify which keywords are being ranked more than once and make adjustments accordingly.
Other Possibilities
There are many more ways you can automate your SEO tasks with Python scripts, such as:
- Keyword growth calculation
- Image optimization
- Collecting GSC data
- Hreflang validation
- Analysing robots.txt files
- Scraping and analysing XML sitemaps
- Bulk auditing a site’s core web vitals, etc.
Final Thoughts
As is evident, Python has great potential in the world of SEO. There are loads of scripts to ease your SEO efforts and make your life easier.
Thus, learning the basics of Python is important for every digital marketer that wants to automate their technical SEO strategies. After all, who still does stuff manually in this era of automation?
In the present day and age, everything should be fast, creative, and time-saving. So, boost your SEO strategy with Python today and position your brand among the first in Google’s SERPs!
