With the volume of data available on the internet, finding a way to identify, extract, and collate useful data is a big headache. On average, about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were being produced daily. While only a fraction of that data is useful to you or your business, getting your hands on it is a crucial investment. So how do you wade through that volume of data to extract the valuable gems? Web scraping is how you do it.
Web scraping is the unique process of extracting data from web pages. Using bots known as “crawlers or “spiders,” web scraping allows you to parse through the source code of a given webpage and extract data according to some preset parameters. This method will enable users to save large quantities of data from the internet locally.
Web scraping helps make it easy for you to search for, tag, and collect data from various sources and store all available data at an accessible location. The idea of web scraping is to allow you to create a localized central database within a short period for easy access and readability. You can easily collect data in large volumes (the kind that would be impossible to collect manually) from multiple web pages.
There are many ways you can use web scraping to help implement data-driven strategies for your business. Here are a handful of web scraping ideas to inspire your data collection investments.
Web Scraping Ideas for Your Business
SEO Monitoring
Search engine optimization (SEO) is how you improve your website and content to rank better and higher on search engines. To successfully implement an SEO strategy, you need data on the best keywords to optimize within your niche, the keywords your competitors are ranking for, and the highest-ranking content and websites in your industry. This is where web scraping comes in.
Business entities can employ a web scraping tool that helps scrape selected websites for the different keyword rankings. This could also be applied to specific marketing keywords, which smart businesses would use to help their website rank better. You can scrape Google’s keyword tool for the highest-ranking content for a particular keyword. You can scrape your competitor’s website or blog for data on the type of content they are creating. If they create a specific type of content and get a lot of traffic, you should probably consider that type of content.
Through web scraping, you can collect and actively monitor the content that receives a lot of attention from online users over time. Web scraping can also be used to create user-friendly title tags or metatags by finding suitable keywords to use which will increase the ranking of the webpage on search results. Sometimes, lower-ranking content gets more attention than higher-ranking ones if optimized for hitting target searches. Web scraping can help you keep track of the content that has the potential to create the most value.
Price Monitoring & Comparison
One of the worst things that could happen to you as a business owner is to miss a chance to increase prices or sell at high prices while everybody is selling low, or, conversely, be undercut by the competition. You can use web scraping to compare and keep track of changes in the price of goods and commodities. Depending on economic conditions and the cost of manufacturing, the prices of goods are always changing. As a result, you need to keep up and update your prices according to the market. Web scraping can help you do this. By scraping your competitors’ websites, opinion forums, and industry news blogs, you can easily keep up with news and updates that could lead to a change in prices. Web scraping is also used to collect various information product descriptions, prices, and market context from the web for comparison and analysis. Sales data, audience analytics data, and so many elements of smart market practices can be optimized with web scraping.
With the use of web scraping, businesses become more aware of potential competitors by gathering data on their competitors’ activities, with broad application across industries, and ultimately gain intelligent pricing strategies.
Consumer Research
Another application of web scraping is in the aspect of Consumer Research. For business organizations, consumer research is vital. Your consumers are your business, and web scraping can keep with changes in their needs, their moods, even the methods they buy. A single social media post can start a consumer trend that could put you out of business or make you a millionaire. Either way, you need to know what your consumers are feeling. Scraping social media platforms, forums, and news websites can easily give you the data you need to keep with consumer trends.
Also, if you are having trouble defining your audience, web scraping offers a viable solution. You can scrape industry forums and social media for posts related to your keywords. By observing the categories of people that post about your niche and their expressed needs and wants, you can better understand who your ideal customer is and how to target them better. It helps to understand what the targeted consumer desires from certain products or services, how the public sees your products and services, and whether the public accepts your products and services.
You can use web scraping to gather data from customer review websites also. This will tell you your customers’ reactions to your product and quality of service.
Lead Generation
Web Scraping is another means through which businesses generate leads. If you are trying to improve your profit margin, then one of the most important things you need to do is get more leads. More leads mean more potential customers, which means more money. Web scraping helps you to obtain data on potential customers from websites or social media. If you sell a B2B service, you can scrape business-listing platforms or directories like Yelp and YellowPages for data businesses that fit your ideal customer profile. You can also scrape a platform like LinkedIn for data on the point-of-contact person in those companies.
Financial Data Analysis
Doing profitable business involves knowing how to manage money. To manage money properly, you need to keep an eye on the ebb and flow of money in the market. You need to stay abreast of updates on how money is being used. Web scraping can help you collect data from platforms like Yahoo! Finance to build a long-term financial strategy for your business. Through the use of web scraping, you can extract all necessary financial data and plans needed.
Scraping financial data helps businesses access real-time data and be aware of changes in the financial market.
Conclusion
Web scraping is one of the best techniques you can employ to help you implement big data analytics in your business processes. With web scraping, you can collect already-structured data on-demand, directly into a format that you can easily use from any website on the internet. There are many web scraping project ideas you can implement to make your business use data for better decision-making. While we’ve mentioned just a few of them, the potential is always evolving. If you have web scraping projects and ideas of your own, find out how web scraping can reveal the insights you’re looking for.
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