How Web Scraping Can Help Your Business In 2023?

• By Manthan Koolwal
• 07-12-2022
• Technology

Data is the need of the hour for any business to grow. It helps us to understand our customers better and provides us with valuable insights.

In the past, data was only available to those who had the resources to collect it. The collection of data manually to thrive businesses in those days was a tedious & time taking task.

Nowadays, we can collect data from many sources such as social media, online marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, technology sites, and many other places. There are tools and services for extracting the desired data.

Using web scraping is one way many businesses can do this task at pace and accurately. However, there isn’t one best way of collecting data for your business but with web scraping, you can almost scrape any data available for public use on the internet.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is a technique of extracting information from online platforms or websites. The data can be extracted in many formats such as JSON, Excel, and CSV.

Web scraping has many uses and applications. It can be used for lead generation, brand audits, data mining, sentiment analysis, web page content analysis, etc.

Many Ecommerce companies use it to monitor their competitors’ prices or to find out what people are saying about them on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

How Web Scraping is Done?

There are services available in the market that can do web scraping for you. The other way you can do it is by using a Web Scraping tool, which in many instances is one of the fastest ways to extract data.

You can design a web scraper of your own to extract data if you have knowledge of programming languages like python, node js, c#, etc.

How Web Scraping can Help your Business?

There are a number of ways web scraping can help your business. However, for the sake of this blog, we will keep it only to 5 ways.

1. Lead Generation

One of the best use cases of web scraping is using it for lead generation. Web Scraping is used extensively to generate leads for many businesses. Your business can generate leads by getting contact credentials available on the web.

Well there are numerous other ways, a business can generate leads, here are a few suggestions so as to get leads if you are just starting out:

• Web scraping the data on online directories
• Web scraping social media
• Scraping the job data postings

2. Price scraping for competitor intelligence

A competitor intelligence report is a valuable resource for any business. It provides insights into the strategies that your competitors are using and also helps you to identify opportunities to grow your business.

One way to gain competitive intelligence over your competitor is by keeping an eye on their pricing. Many E-commerce companies can leverage the most out of it.

Web Scraping can be used to identify what pricing others have kept for the same product as your business sells. You can keep track of all other platforms they have registered for.

Analyzing the price data for your competitor can gain you intelligence over them. Further, you can strategize your pricing and change it if needed.

3. Web Scraping for SEO

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an established businessman, you might have heads in “Search Engine Optimization”. It is a channel in marketing to optimize content and keywords on your webpage to improve its ranking in google searches.

The backbone of SEO is “keywords”. By using web scraping you can scrape keywords and content of your competitors and analyze them so as to improve your rankings. Not only this, but you can also collect data for off-the-page content posting strategies used by them.

4. Web Scraping for Brand Monitoring

Brand monitoring is a process of gathering, analyzing, and reporting on the activities that are happening in relation to a brand. It is a way to keep up with the trends and activities that occur in the market by continuously measuring and evaluating the brand's performance.

With web scraping, you can continuously monitor the brand’s official channels be it social or a review platform. Extracting data from these channels can eventually help you in knowing how your brand is performing in the real world.

You can extract data pointers like

• What is the most talked about thing about your brand
• What puts you behind as a brand
• Why people love you as a brand and many other data that further can help you to strategize your branding.

5. Web Scraping for Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining determines whether a piece of writing is positive or negative.

The sentiment analysis process can be broken down into three steps: 1) sentiment identification, 2) sentiment extraction, and 3) sentiment classification.

Sentiment identification determines the polarity of a sentence by identifying words that have a positive or negative connotation. Sentiment extraction identifies the most emotive words in a sentence and assigns them a polarity score. Sentiment classification assigns sentiment to each word in the sentence based on its polarity score.

By now you must be started to understand how analyzing sentiment can be important for your business. It is a way a customer feels and thinks or connects with a brand. And hence extracting that thought is important for a brand to understand what brand picture the audience has in the mind for a particular brand.

Conclusion

Be it a startup or a multimillionaire company, the 5 use cases of scraping discussed above can be used by any. There can be endless use cases of web scraping, and one can use it as per own use.

Every day businesses are finding creative ways to use web scraping to leverage maximum for them. Web scraping when done right can do wonders for any business.