Website categorization is a term that may not seem too glamorous or super powerful at first glance. Classifying websites based on content and objective doesn’t strike fear or awe, yet if you’re a marketer or business owner, we dare you to stick around and learn more about this interesting method of scanning your online surroundings. We guarantee that, by the end of this story, you’ll change your mind about website categorization.

It is one of the most versatile and powerful tools you can acquire on your journey towards business success. Website categorization allows you to protect your website, company, and brand, find your target audience, keep tabs on your marketing strategy, and much, much more.

Ready to give it a chance? Let’s go!

What’s the deal with website categorization?

Since website categorization as a term may seem a little abstract, the best way to help you understand it is to put it to work.

Go to your email. Instead of looking into familiar emails by friends and colleagues, dig into promotional and spam folders. Find the one that seems particularly confusing or unfamiliar. Look at the sender’s address and copy it.

Then navigate to this page and paste the address in the search bar. This will allow you to see what kind of website or domain is behind this address. Now imagine how useful this can be every time you receive an email you suspect is coming from an illegitimate source. But this is not where website categorization necessarily has to end. Imagine you can use this tool to check who’s visiting your website, who’s talking about you online, which website is the right place for your advertisement, and much more.

If you google website categorization, you may notice there are many tools that categorize websites. However, the credibility of their information and multiple uses for these tools rely heavily on the depth of their available database and the quality of their tool.

So what’s the difference between the other website categorization tools and Website Categorization API you’ve just tried?

The difference between all the other tools and website categorization API is that the latter is the closest thing to a real human being checking every nook and cranny of the domain you’re interested in. The bonus is, this tool can do this on hundreds of thousands of websites in a single second.

Website Categorization API does this by fusing machine learning and human surveillance in a unique three-level process that consists of:

• Crawling session (collecting and organizing website content) and analysis of website response during this process.
• Examining the collected content using machine learning. This allows Website Categorization API not only to categorize existing content based on available data, but to also categorize new content based on content and response patterns from similar websites.
• Human monitoring of the analyzed information.

Now let’s see how this amazing process of analysis can help you boost your security and business success.

How can I use website categorization?

For a long time, the primary purpose of all of the Whois XML API tools had been cybersecurity. However, at some point we realized that a goldmine of cyber intelligence can be so much more, thus developing personalized solutions oriented towards branding and marketing. But let’s go one by one.

1. Cybersecurity tool

Cybersecurity starts at home - in this case, your website. The best way to prevent the attacks is to know who you’re letting inside.

In the beginning, we gave you a great example of a simple website categorization - analyzing a suspicious email. With the API tool, this process can be fully automated, analyzing all the traffic that is coming to your website and email server. This allows you to block malicious or suspicious content in several ways.

Unlike regular content filters, website categorization has a mind of its own, so it can securely make a decision who’s allowed to send you emails and access your website. At the same time, you can employ website categorization as a traditional web filter, protecting your network and employees from any cyber threats.

But Website Categorization API also allows you to be a bit of a detective. You can use it to analyze domains of your website visitors, with a special focus on the recurring ones. If there are suspicious activities (such as attempts at form jacking or login from unknown domain), you can investigate the domain for its origin, malware, phishing, spyware, and other dangerous activities. Moreover, you can block both the potential culprit and its associated domains from accessing your website.

You can find a detailed case study about the ways to counteract phishing here.

2. Branding and copyright protection tool

Building, nurturing, and expanding a brand is one of those business endeavors that cannot be measured in numbers, yet creates the greatest long-term value for your company. Nowadays, when all of our communication has moved online, making and breaking brands has become easier than ever.

Monitoring mentions of your brand both in desired and unwanted context is a great headstart if you want to craft your image carefully. With website categorization, you can see who’s talking about you, block references in unwanted categories, and even monitor any attempts at copyright infringement.

Apart from scaling the Internet with the name of your business in mind, Website Categorization API can also help you quickly catch those who would like to imitate you. For example, financial institutions’ and payment platforms’ websites are often mimicked in phishing attacks, fooling visitors into willingly giving out their personal information. These companies know how much damage it can do to their brand and reputation, so they use domain monitoring tools to keep an eye on any new domains attempting to use their brand’s name in some capacity.

You can read our case study on brand protection here.

3. Advertising and lead generation tool

If you’re a savvy businessperson, by this point you already have a pretty solid idea on how this tool can boost your marketing efforts.

We’ve already mentioned that Website Categorization API allows you to analyze domains of your website visitors. These visitors don’t always have to be threats - in fact, a lot of them are amazing business opportunities. Thanks to this tool, you can collect business domains and email contacts from recurring visitors, analyze other visitors based on their locations, etc.

Using a brand monitoring tool, you can also stay on top of your game with the image you’re building in the digital world. But this is only the beginning of Website Categorization’s marketing powers.

Website Categorization API specializes in contextual advertising. This form of advertising has been gaining traction among smart marketers who are aware of the fact that data protection and privacy laws are changing the way they can analyze and reach their target audience. The beauty of contextual advertising is that it’s focusing on being in the right place at the right time. How?

Contextual advertising is based on displaying ads on pages or websites that are relevant to your product or service. For example, if you sell car parts, your ads will show up on websites about automobiles or on blog posts that discuss which car components that should be replaced every few years. Of course, contextual targeting is a job that is easier imagined than done - unless you’re using a highly sophisticated tool as website categorization API.

Using the same three-step analysis we’ve already described, Website Categorization allows you to create a list of websites for your contextual ad campaigns. Website Categorization classifies a website into 1-3 categories out of 25 available, allowing you to pinpoint a combination of categories relevant to your business.

You can read more about contextual targeting here.

Conclusion

At this point, you may be impressed, but maybe you’re still not convinced? That’s all right - at Whois XML API, we believe that trust is something that should be earned. This is why you can get started with Website Categorization for free - you get 100 free requests and you don’t even have to give us your credit card number.

As you’re trying out this tool, we encourage you to dive deeper into the world of Whois XML API solutions and find the one that is the right fit for your business. We are flexible with prices and packages, and we’re here to answer all of your questions, so if you have any, just leave us a message and our team will contact you as soon as you can say API!