In this era of machine learning, we want the highest efficiency and speed for our company using advanced AI tools. One such tool is web scraping services, which lets us gather the most vital data within a minimal time. In modern businesses, one needs to master the art of moving data across companies to stand ahead of the competition.
This article promises to offer a brief overview of web scraping, the various kinds of web scrapers available, and the ways web scraping business tools can improve business intelligence, hence boosting your business growth.
1. How do you define web scraping?
Web scraping, also called web data extraction, is an intelligent and automated method that enables businesses to collect large chunks of vital data from different web pages. The company uses this information to extract and store it in readable formats, such as APIs or Excel spreadsheets. The company later uses this data to analyze various insights, like sources of potential buyers, their online presence, and buying behaviors, or to get notified of product price drops.
Moreover, these tools can simplify the data harvesting tasks since it’s often difficult to manually scrape information from such diverse shapes, styles, and forms of websites. Hence, automated web scrapers can extract entire HTML codes of web pages, including JavaScript and CSS elements, within minutes!
2. Web Scraping and Web Crawling: What are the key differences
To put it briefly, web scraping involves the extraction of data from different websites, and web crawling is about discovering various links or URLs on the web. Generally, the web data extraction process involves a combination of both crawling and then scraping vital information from one or more websites.
Furthermore, web crawling usually captures only generic information about any website, without having specific information like domain names or sometimes even URLs. A classic example of web crawling is when search engines crawl different websites for indexing pages and ranking them on the search engine results pages. Web scraping works on a deeper level by working with specific URLs and extracting the data you would need for boosting your company’s growth. In this case, web scrapers at least know the domains they are scraping.
In terms of output also, web crawling is a lot simpler as it deals with a list of web page URLs as compared to web data extraction, which converts the collected data from unstructured HTML to a more readable Excel or CSV format.
3. What are the different types of web scrapers?
Web scrapers can be of various types and forms, and comparing one another can be quite intricate and complex. To keep things simple, we can divide web scrapers into four main categories, namely –
Pre-built or Self-built: You will be happy to know that anyone, even a novice, can build a web scraper using the available tools, such as the prebuilt ones available for download and instant use.
Browser Extensions vs. Computer Software: Having the ability to be added to our browsers anytime, web scraping extensions offer simpler performance once integrated into our desired browser. However, since these extensions are limited to the particular browser we are integrating them into, computer software offers a wider scope and advanced features, since you can download and install it in your system.
User Interface: While some web scrapers can run on a minimal UI, others need to run on a fully-featured UI, in which the entire website is rendered, and the users simply need to select the data they actually need. Some scrapers would also provide helpful suggestions for people with limited technical skills, ensuring they can complete the data extraction tasks with ease.
Local vs. Cloud: Cloud-based scrapers operate on an off-site server that the company provides, thus freeing up one’s computer resources. Local web scrapers, however, operate by using a computer’s resources and an internet connection, thus using high amounts of RAM or CPU.
4. How can web scraping be utilized to improve business analytics and intelligence?
Using web scraping APIs, you can gather your competitor data, such as their potential market, source of leads, social media activities, buyer’s profiles, and other crucial information. The usage of web scraping business intelligence tools is quite common in a B2B setting, as they can help companies gather actionable and relevant data, mostly about prospects and leads.
Some of the use cases of web scraping to boost business analytics and intelligence include –
- Real estate listing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Comparing shopping sites
- Getting industry statistics and analytics
- Website transitions
- Lead generation
- Social media insights and analytics
5. How to Use Scraping to Gather Competitive Intelligence?
Every business wants to improve its marketing strategies to move towards its goals faster. They are constantly working on ways to improve their products and services, to enhance customer satisfaction. By extracting competitive intelligence, a company can learn the things they are doing right and the areas they need to improve to stay ahead of the competition.
In short, web scraping business intelligence solutions help to gain knowledge and insights from the rival’s experience and learn from mistakes to boost business growth. Scraping can be the fastest and easiest way to generate large volumes of vital data and use it to analyze social media sentiments, competitor price monitoring, improve search engine rankings, and so on.
6. The top 15 ways web scraping can be helpful for boosting your business productivity
Here are the top 15 ways you can use web scraping to boost your company’s productivity –
1. Scrape Prices and Product Details
Web scrapers crawl a store’s web portal and extract data like product prices, product descriptions, images, and other attributes, to generate valuable insights and analytics, and affiliations.
2. Curate Data and Perform Custom Analysis
This method is specifically for new websites for whom the scraped data would be helpful in building effective marketing strategies from scratch. Using this method, new online businesses can deliver targeted ads and news to their customers.
3. Track Online Presence and Analyze Social Media Sentiments
It’s vital to get insights into customers’ buying habits and search patterns from social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. Besides, web scraping can help businesses track their competitors’ online presence and analyze their social media marketing strategies. Businesses can also track the performance of their competitors’ products, buyer behaviors, customer interactions, and their reactions across social media platforms.
4. Manage and Improve Online Reputation
Most of us rely on customer reviews before buying a particular product. Hence, it’s important to maintain a positive online reputation to attract more prospects and leads. Scraping customer ratings, reviews, and comments from competitors’ portals helps to analyze buyer sentiments.
5. Detect Fake Reviews
Since customers rely on reviews and ratings, it’s also important to detect any opinion spamming or fraudulent reviews. Often, spammers write fake reviews to mislead buyers, which may hamper online reputation. Hence, web scraping may help detect those fraudulent comments and block or verify them, thus enhancing buyers’ experiences.
6. Generate Public Opinion
It’s necessary to gather information about public opinion, like what customers think or feel about a particular product or brand monitoring services. Such data can be scraped from their comments or opinions posted on social media.
7. Deliver Ultra-targeted Ads to Clients
By analyzing customer sentiments and behaviors from competitors’ sites, you can create and deliver highly-targeted ads to your clients based on their preferences, personalities, lifestyle choices, and buying habits.
8. Track Stock Availability and Prices
Automated web scraping tools can also help track stock availability and product prices of your rivals, and keep you notified in real-time. To stand ahead of the market competition, you need to monitor your counterparts closely and learn where you can make improvements.
9. SEO Tracking
You can track your SEO competitors by scraping organic search result data, and detect their rankings on a particular search term. This would also help you to determine the keywords and title tags your rivals are ranking on.
10. Lead Generation
Web scraping can help you boost your lead generation tasks incredibly by analyzing vital data from competitors’ sites, such as contact details, business names, product and service info, location and market presence, client reviews, and others.
11. Business-specific Web Scraping
If you are a self-employed professional like a doctor or a lawyer, you may want to scrape information from the web portal of a fellow professional, and analyze their fees, client base, specializations, and services offered.
12. Organize Events
To scale your event management business, you can scrape events from numerous event management portals, thus allowing you to consolidate all your events and services together.
13. Job Search
Searching for jobs can be tough and time-consuming, especially when there are numerous portals out there. To smoothen this task, you can scrape various job sites and gather all the listed job info in one place. You can also use a web scraper to geo-target the job listings and generate contact details of employers, job descriptions, job locations, responsibilities, salary ranges, and so on.
14. Boost Content Marketing Strategies
To attract more organic leads, you need to work on improving your search engine rankings. To achieve that end, you need to create engaging content on trending topics, while ensuring your blog articles or social media posts are informative and targeted toward your specific audience. You can scrape content marketing activities and strategies from your competitors’ portals to gain more valuable content creation insights.
15. Better Decision-Making on Products Deployment and Investments
It’s important to make your money grow through small investments. However, people often make wrong investment choices, ending up wasting money. Web scraping can help you analyze the current trends of different company websites and track their market worth and other activities.
Concluding Thoughts
The web scraping tool is beneficial for a variety of businesses, especially those who are working on boosting their online presence. Digital businesses rely on web scraping business solutions for the highest accuracy and efficiency of data fetching, rather than doing it manually, thus saving time and other resources. We hope the above methods would help you boost your business growth and generate more leads.
