A common question among budding digital marketers across the globe is this:
What are traffic bots and are they good for business?
The answer to the first question is simple, as you will soon find out in this article. To answer the second question, however, we will first have to consider several factors.
In this article, we will provide comprehensive answers to both questions. In the process, we will also highlight ways it can benefit and harm your business.
What are traffic bots?
The visits your website pages get on the internet are called traffic. Most of it is due to human interaction, while some are a result of non-human activities. Any online traffic that non-human activities generate on the internet is known as BOT traffic. This traffic comes from specific automated scripts for computer programs known as traffic bots. As much as they try to mimic human behavior, they are not humans.
The primary advantage of traffic bots is that they save time that you would otherwise waste doing basic, repetitive tasks, such as downloading images, clicking links, filling out forms, scraping, etc.
Now that we have answered the question, “what are traffic bots?” We can now proceed to examine the types available on the internet.
Types of traffic bots
Bots are everywhere on the internet. They are said to be responsible for more than 50% of internet traffic. Following closely behind, “what are traffic bots?” is this question, “are traffic bots good for me?”
To answer this, let’s examine the two types of traffic bots
Good traffic bots
They are called good traffic bots because they are legitimate bots that do their best to help your website without causing any harm.
Some examples include:
Search engine bots
Search engine bots are some of the most popular bots available today. They function primarily to help the website get listed on global search engines such as Google Search, Bing, and Yahoo!
Monitoring bots
Once you get your website up and running, there are things you must now prioritize. For instance, you have to ensure that the website is always online and functions as it ought to. With monitoring bots, you can effectively keep tabs on your website and ensure it always works well. The bot will notify you immediately if there’s a malfunction.
SEO Crawlers
Even after doing all the rights, it can be a tough job to get your website to the number one position on SERPs. There is software that can help. These SEO crawlers use relevant data to drive organic traffic to your website.
Copyright bots
It is very common on the internet for other websites to steal your images and copyrighted content without your permission and use them as their own. With copyright bots, you can prevent this from happening.
Bad traffic bot
Now that you know about good bots, there are also bad ones. If left to roam freely, they can attack and harm your website by driving fake traffic, spam traffic, and disruptive ad fraud. Some examples are as follows:
Web scrapers
These bots are notorious for butting into websites, looking for valuable information like email addresses and other contact information to scrape. In the process, they might even steal images and content from websites and social media accounts.
Spam bots
If you are like most internet users, you must have, at one time or the other, seen an unusual blog comment or receive peculiar emails from certain users. More often than not, these activities are not humans but the work of spam bots. Some spam bots might even go as far as filling out contact forms on your website as well as sending you spammed promotional messages.
DDoS Network
This is one of the oldest as well as the deadliest bot on this list. The DDoS, also known as Distributed Denial of Service, sneaks into unsuspecting user’s PC and targets websites and servers to take them offline.
Vulnerability scanners
What vulnerability scanners do is simple. They scan websites for possible vulnerabilities and then send reports to their creators. These creators can, in turn, choose to sell this information to hackers and spammers, consequently exposing the websites in question to potential attacks.
Click fraud bots
Click fraud bots are sophisticated in their design and function. Their primary goal is to target paid ads and generate massive amounts of unwanted, malicious bot traffic. Billions of advertising dollars are lost yearly to these bots. In most cases, advertisers have to install good detection software to protect their ads. The challenge with this is that it increases your ad budget.
With the question, “what are traffic bots, and are they good for me” answered, only one question is left.
Conclusion: How can you leverage a traffic bot for your business?
What are traffic bots?: They are automated scripts for computer programs that generate non-human traffic.
Are they good for your website?: Yes and no. It depends on the ones you use.
Once you can get past the bad traffic bots, the good ones are pretty important for your business. In fact, most companies with online presence are opting for them to ease their work. One such traffic bot is ClickSEO. Our traffic bot will increase the CTR of your website, improve your ranking on SERPs, and ultimately drive traffic to your website. Choose one of our plans to get started.