How you can utilize web scraping for your business
Starting a business or scheming to scale one up? You need data to understand your market to succeed. Web scraping gets this done.
Web scraping provides an advantage against competitors when the data collected is used appropriately in market research and analysis, SEO, lead generation, sentiment analysis, and investment.
A data-driven business can position itself on top of the competition. So read on and gather more insights on how you can utilize web scraping for your business.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the process of extracting unstructured data from a website and transferring it to a structured format, such as a spreadsheet or an API. One can scrape data manually, but it will be more expensive, time-consuming, and complicated because some websites contain multiple pages.
Web scraper types
When web scraping, identify first the amount of data you need and how you prefer to collect data to ensure the usage of the appropriate web scraper.
- Plugins or add-ons: This is best for both gathering data and organizing them easily and requires little knowledge, which makes it great for beginners. Online Success Genie’s tool, Sheets Genie, is an example that scrapes data directly to Google Sheets and allows you to easily organize and sort your data with just one click..
- Software: This is best for scraping small to medium amounts of data. You can install it on your PC and configure its settings to your preference.
- Cloud-based: This is best for scraping a large amount of data, runs in different computing environments, and does not need software installation. Presetting your web scraping conditions provides your business with structured data through the application programming interface (API) or any downloadable format.
How to utilize web scraping for your business
Web scraping has infinite possible applications. Your business can use it in these ways:
1. Market research
Data is a prerequisite when starting or growing your business. Web scraping can extract a high volume of quality and insightful data to understand your target market. Web scraping assists in research and development for optimum point of entry and price automation.
The valuable scraped data will help analyze pivotal business opportunities for timely and decisive business actions.
2. Price comparison and competitor analysis
Spying on competitors is not a business taboo. Web scraping helps identify market trends and competitors’ pricing, products, product descriptions, and marketing strategies.
The collected data provides insights for market positioning, creating automated pricing strategies, product and brand monitoring, revenue optimization, and minimum advertised price (MAP) compliance.
3. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Having your business at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) implies an improved online presence. Web scraping provides businesses great chances of discovering keywords, backlinks, influencers, and other opportunities to improve their website’s SEO.
4. Lead generation
Having a list of possible customers guarantees a top spot in the business competition. Data scraping gives access to websites with contacts of new leads from company and business directories.
Amazon Seller Profile, LinkedIn, and Yellow Pages are some lead sources for scraping to save in a structured format and for business analysis. Nurturing leads will be the only thing to do once they become part of your sales funnel and become return customers.
5. Industry statistics
Businesses can gain insights with scraped industry-specific statistics and analyses like commodity prices, demand, and supply to sell them to the appropriate companies needing them.
6. Customer sentiment analysis
Overwhelmed with a ton of information? Are you having difficulty looking for customer sentiments about your product or service on social media accounts and other platforms?
With your web scraping tool, you can monitor customer sentiments, compare data, recognize trends, and guide your business to provide after-sales services for customer satisfaction.
7. Risk management
It takes sacrifices to establish a business. Your business deals with people. You need employees, clients, and partners. It’s just right to efficiently check their backgrounds through web scraping from sources like corporate registers or legal databases to help your business mitigate risks.
8. Finance and investment
Scraped finance and investment data help well-informed investment decisions. With SEC filing insights, company fundamentals, public sentiment overview, and news monitoring, you can evaluate investment opportunities and risks.
9. Real estate
Investments beget investments. For a real estate business, web scraping RE listings provides your agency with the available properties so you can instantly act as the agent to clients who access your website.
Do you want to acquire real estate properties using your business revenue McDonald’s style? Web scraping can find offers that fit your preference for value appraisal, vacancy monitoring, rental yields, and real estate market direction.
To a successful business!
With the right web scraping tool and proper data collection and usage, we wish your business success!
