How Can Web Scraping Help Your Business? 5 Effective Ways
Are you looking for ways to bring improvements to your business? Here are five ways web scraping can help you with that. The popular saying, “knowledge is power,” can be applied to multiple aspects – including your business. Knowledge is the most powerful tool you have when running your business; this includes having information about your competitors and leads.
However, looking for information manually is time-consuming and requires a lot of human resources. This is why it’s best to take the help of tools or technology that can do the job efficiently and effortlessly.
One such tool or method is web scraping. Keep reading to find out five ways web scraping and how tools like bypass akamai can help your business.
Contents
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process by which you search the world wide web and extract information that’s useful for your business. It’s also referred to as web harvesting or web data extraction.
You can use a web scraping service to find lots of information regarding all that surrounds your business environment; think of it as vital intel that can help you improve and give you an advantage over your competitors.
Now, a common question that arises when speaking of web scraping is whether or not it’s legal. To answer that question – yes, it is permitted as long as you’re scraping information that has been released to the public. However, if you try to extract data related that are protected (like personal information), it will get you into trouble.
How Does Web Scraping Work?
Web scraping is a rather complicated process. A web scraper tool is designed to analyze the structure of a particular website, which means it basically studies how the data is organized. Most of the time, data on the internet is unstructured. However, a web scraping tool can easily navigate around that.
So how do web scrapers perform their tasks? Firstly, you will have to provide the tool with a website URL or a list of URLs. The scraper will then go to the assigned URL(s) and scrape all the information there. You can let it do this automatically or simply select the type of data you want to scrape.
Once the scan is done, the scraper will easily let you download the data and convert it into an excel sheet or any other format you want.
What Methods Do Scraping Tools Use?
If you are looking for some of the best web scraping tools out there, then you might want to look at which scraping method they use. The software usually makes use of two different kinds of methods to perform the task. The first method directly accesses a given website using an HTTP link with the help of a web browser.
The other method requires the use of a bot or a web crawler. These bots systematically surf the internet and are often used by search engines. You can decide based on which method will be convenient for you.
Web Scraping vs. Data Mining
It is straightforward to confuse web scraping with data mining, mainly because they are similar when considering their meaning. However, these two are entirely different things. Web scraping involves the extraction of data from a certain website and then presenting it in a structured way, which is easier for the user to understand. This process does not involve data processing or analysis.
Data mining, however, is used to analyze large data sets. This helps users to discover valuable insights and trends. The data isn’t extracted from the website in this case. Web scraping can actually be used to create large data sheets, which can then be utilized in data mining.
Ways Web Scraping Can Help Business
As mentioned before, web scraping allows you to extract data. So what kind of data are you going to extract? And how will the extracted information be relevant to you and your business? Let’s look at five ways information obtained by web scraping can benefit your business.
Monitoring Competitors
If you look at the web from a broader perspective, you will see that there’s a lot of information just waiting to be discovered. For example, competitor product pricing, product comparisons, and if their prices are more competitive than yours.
Such information can help push your business forward. Firstly, by looking at data about prices at which products similar to yours are being sold, you can ultimately come up with a price that’s most appropriate for your customer base. Moreover, you can use this to also bring in customers who are primarily concerned about better prices.
This is also a good way to determine whether or not you’re overcharging your customers. If you do that, there’s a greater chance that they will find the same services elsewhere at a lesser price. As you can see, with information brought in by web scraping, you’re bringing in new customers and keeping your existing ones.
Monitoring Brand Health
Of course, monitoring the market will bring in loads of insightful data that you can use to better your business. But then, how will you know if your newly applied strategies are working or not? Web scraping is a very versatile process in the sense that you don’t just use it to look into external data.
You can use it to monitor yourself as well. This is usually done by scraping various social media sites to find out how customers perceive your services. It’s like looking at customer reviews but taking an even deeper dive to determine your company’s success.
Finding Leads
For any business owner, finding potential leads is crucial in order to increase sales. Web scraping is one of the ways to generate new business leads. Leads are usually customers interested in investing in the services that your company has to offer them. All companies tend to develop these leads from a number of different sources.
After a while, they check to see if all those leads are suitable for the kind of services or products they are selling. Lead generation is difficult because sometimes companies try to manually research potential leads. This is very time-consuming, especially considering the fact that it doesn’t generate that many results.
Web scraping tools make lead generation easy as it is mostly automated. These tools can also help you effectively browse through the Internet to find those frequently interacting with businesses in your niche. It can also help you find potential employees who can further benefit your company. With web scraping, you can get more results and save a lot of time.
Finding SEO Keywords
Whether you’re a small business or a large one, you will know that SEO (search engine optimization)services can help increase your sales. The goal of SEO is to increase traffic to your website. This can also bring in potential leads – some of the people who end up visiting your website might be good business leads who can get in contact with you in the future.
Now SEO centers around the use of keywords. With web scraping, you can search the internet to determine which keywords are currently being used in your particular business niche. How are these keywords being used? What kind of content is being put out by using these keywords? Once you have an idea of this, you can create your own keywords and use SEO services to draw in more visitors to your website.
Finding Influencers
Lastly, scraping allows you to find a number of influencers who you can sponsor. So how does this work? You can begin by scraping social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. What this does is allows you to find influencers who are currently the most popular. If you do it right, you can easily find influencers who show interest in the kind of products and services you offer.
Once you find them, you can have your PR team reach out to them with an offer to collaborate with them through an affiliate program. Since these influencers were shortlisted because their content was relevant to your service, you can rest assured that this will be able to bring in more customers.
how can web scraping help business: conclusion
An inflow of sales keeps a business running, and to ensure consistent sales, companies need to utilize proper pricing and marketing strategies. A common mistake made by business owners is not prioritizing finding valuable data on the web.
Web scraping is a necessary process for gathering data to help you make more informed decisions regarding marketing and your overall business strategy. Hence, using web scrapers can help your business reach its goals and increase profits.
