Search engine optimization moves fast. Google‘s algorithm sees multiple updates per year. New competitors pop up daily. To stay ahead, today‘s SEO professionals need constant access to fresh data. For Epicup, a trailblazing SEO analytics provider, reliable web scraping is the key to empowering 5,000+ users with real-time, strategic insights.
Epicup – The SEO Insights Engine
Founded in 2011 by veterans of the SEO industry, Utah-based Epicup understood the value of up-to-the-minute data. Within a few years, their SaaS platform became the go-to solution for uncovering search engine secrets.
With $12 million in funding and marquee customers like Visa, Epicup now serves over 5,000 subscription users globally. Their ability to deliver high-impact SEO analytics relies on ingesting mountains of granular data – search rankings, clickstreams, results page content and more.
CEO Dennett Ingram sums up their mission: "We empower customers to make smarter SEO decisions by turning raw data into clear, actionable insights."
The Need for Speed…and Scale
Epicup‘s platform integrates data from dozens of public online sources. Before adopting web scraping, analysts performed this manually – copying ranking stats, analyzing SERPs, exporting results.
This manual harvesting couldn‘t keep pace as Epicup‘s user base boomed. Long delays between data collection cycles meant insights were stale by the time clients received them.
Epicup needed to automate scraping for both speed and scale. But early scraping efforts using static IPs faced blocking, bandwidth limits and frequent outages. Failure rates exceeded 50% some weeks, undermining data accuracy.
Vice President Paula Snyder recalls this impact: "With so much outdated or incomplete data, our clients doubted if we could really deliver ‘real-time‘ insights. We knew we had to scrap our current scraping approach."
The 3 Must-Haves for Web Scraping
Epicup defined 3 vital capabilities for a new web scraping solution:
1. High uptime – Minimum 95%+ success rate, even at high volumes, to ensure comprehensive data collection.
2. Speed – Average response time under 500 ms per request to facilitate rapid scraping cycles.
3. Affordability – Cost-effective pricing models to align with SaaS business economics.
However, finding a scraping provider that met all 3 seemed unlikely.
Oxylabs – Supercharging Web Scraping
In 2016, Epicup adopted Oxylabs‘ SERP Scraper API. This provides industrial-scale web scraping capabilities through millions of proxies worldwide.
Oxylabs‘ global, high-performance proxy network overcame previous limitations:
- Uptime – Proxy rotation prevents IP blocks, delivering 99.5%+ success rates for Epicup‘s high-volume scraping.
- Speed – Distributed proxies reduce individual loads, enabling average response times under 200 ms.
- Cost – Bulk pricing models cut expenses by ~30% compared to other popular providers.
Equally importantly, Oxylabs‘ hands-on support and infrastructure expertise allowed Epicup to fully optimize their scraping operations.
Scraping Success – The Numbers
With Oxylabs powering their web scraping, Epicup achieved dramatic improvements:
- 10x increase in URLs scraped per month, from 200K to over 2 million.
- Data freshness improved from weekly to daily harvesting cycles.
- 99.7% uptime across scraping jobs, up from 85% previously.
- Over 50% cost reduction compared to other proxy providers evaluated.
**[Insert graph showing decrease in cost per 1M URLs scraped]`
VP Paula Snyder says it best: "With Oxylabs, we aren‘t just scraping more data. We‘re extracting insights faster, serving customers better, and scraping smarter."
Location, Location, Location
Another key benefit came from Oxylabs‘ geo-targeted proxies. Epicup‘s user base spans North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.
With localized proxies, Epicup can mirror users‘ geographic contexts by scraping country-specific Google and Bing data. This provides SEO insights tailored to each market.
For example, rankings in Google.com vs Google.co.uk can diverge significantly. Geographic scraping ensures alignment with what each user base actually experiences.
Top Tips for Choosing a Web Scraping Partner
For any SEO provider considering web scraping, Epicup recommends:
- Assess reliability first – even slight downtimes can degrade data. Look for proven uptime SLAs.
- Compare speed test results – faster providers offer a major edge for timely analytics.
- Demand responsive support – you‘ll need an engaged partner to optimize scraping operations.
- Consider geographic coverage – if targeting multiple continents, global proxies are a must.
- Evaluate data volumes needed – some providers limit monthly scrape requests.
- Regularly review costs – scraping overhead should align to business returns.
"Scraping is now a pillar of our SEO analytics stack," says Paula Snyder. "Choosing the right provider laid the foundation for our next decade of growth."
Scraping-Fueled SEO Intelligence
The web scraping landscape continues advancing rapidly. Epicup is still raising the bar. In 2024, they released major updates to their platform leveraging AI for automated SEO recommendations.
"Scraping isn‘t just about retrieval – it‘s about insight," explains CEO Dennett Ingram. "By continuously expanding our sources and analytics, we uncover more opportunities for customers to outperform competitors."
For modern SEO experts, web data is the fuel for strategic decision making. Reliable scraping unlocks this high-octane fuel. If you‘re evaluating scraping solutions, study providers closely. A partner invested in your success can accelerate both data collection and business growth. With the right approach, you too can start scraping smarter.
