If you are doing business online, you will, for sure, need to deal with internet data. Either it’s your own content or information about your competitors’ web data scraping will play a major role in a successful marketing strategy for your business. However, what is web scraping, and how can you use it to your advantage? In this article, we will cover a few cases where web scraping becomes immensely important.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping process defines collecting public data from all over the internet. This practice refers to identifying data on the web and then extracting it for the later analysis depending on the project. Web scraping allows businesses to acquire and analyze large swaths of data efficiently. In essence, web scraping practice calls for web sources, automation, and proxy networks.
Also Read: How to Backup Critical Business Data?
Proxies for Web Scraping
Proxies work as an intermediary between you and the internet server. In this way, your actual IP address appears hidden, allowing you to scrape the web efficiently, overcoming any restrictions and bans.
Even though there are different types of proxies available, there are ones that are specifically helpful for web scraping processes. For the best data gathering result, choose data center proxies that are both incredible in their speed and quality. Data center proxies are hosted on servers which generally have the ability to handle significant amounts of web traffic quickly.
Web Scraping for your Business
You can use web scraping for your business’s benefits by including these processes:
- Pricing Intelligence
Price comparison sites use web scraping tools to collect data on the prices and product descriptions of items. With the use of both businesses skim through hundreds of e-commerce websites, grabbing all the relevant data they need, and storing it in their servers. When one of their users sends a search request for a particular product, the website looks through this database of scraped information and compares the prices between multiple suppliers. The comparison results are then served to the visitor.
Extracted data from websites allow you to get significant knowledge into your own business choices dependent on any advancement the rivals might be running. Understanding competitor pricing models will grant you an edge against everyone else in the industry.
- SEO Monitoring
Are you struggling to attract more clients into your business? Then data scraping is the way to go. With the right Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you can easily acquire information from high ranking sites. Such information includes:
- Best ranking keywords
- Titles
- Backlinks used by the top-ranking websites
- Customer queries, etc.
With this information on your hands, you can use various techniques listed above to get better ranking on the search engines and, thus, reach your audience and sell more. Search Engine Optimization is an incredibly efficient way to increase the amount of potential clients in the long-run.
- Travel Fare Aggregation
Travel aggregators send out web scraping bots to the internet, sifting through the sites of travel agencies, hotel chains, and airlines for ticket and room price information. Then they save this data on their servers, process them, and serve them in a convenient and easy-to-read format for the end-user.
When you send a search query to a travel aggregator – say, ticket prices for Tokyo to Berlin – the aggregator algorithm looks through all the ticket price information it has in its database and gives you the prices of all the airlines and agencies for that flight. It can even compare prices from multiple airlines for a given date, offering you the relevant and specific information that you’re looking for.
- Sentiment analysis
Social media platforms and online forums are hotspots for discussion and conversation about your brand and products. Marketing teams always have their eyes and ears open for how their campaigns and advertising affect market sentiment – how people feel about the product or brand that they’re promoting.
Through the use of web scraping, they can look through forum posts and online discussions and gain insights on how the market feels about their products, what aspects they like and dislike, and how receptive their target is to a campaign’s message.
Automated web scraping tools let them do this in markets both local and abroad, allowing them to craft relevant and specific campaigns for each market. Sentiment analysis also allows businesses to tailor their products and solutions to better suit their clients needs.
Also Read: How to Bypass Geo-Blocking to Access Content Online?
Conclusion
Data harvesting will assist your business in meeting market trends and staying relevant by providing access to information that otherwise might require significant amounts of work or finances to acquire. With the use of the right tools and proxies, you will be able to scrape the web in many different ways, including price intelligence, SEO monitoring, or sentiment analysis. All these, combined with great tools, will serve your businesses benefit and make you a successful, well-informed owner.