Every business needs information to survive. In fact, without information, you will soon be left behind in your business field or niche. Interestingly, for you to stay properly informed in your business and make the best decisions, you need the right data.
Unfortunately, not every information on the internet is easily accessible for download. The good news, however, is that web scraping can help you collect relevant data, even from protected sites. Besides, you can even get access to unstructured data using pre-built extractors like Web Automation.
Once you scrape your needed data from right sources, web scrapers like Web automation can help you further analyze the data and provide you with valuable insights into almost everything.
So you may wondering how your business could benefit from web scraping. Well, in this article, we shall look into 6 benefits every business can leverage with ethical web scraping.
Before then, let’s show you some reasons why web scraping has become the need of the hour.
Why Web scraping is now a popular need
Imagine John coming back home from work with a big smile on his face, bragging about how fulfilled his day at the office was. He had successfully researched useful information for his company and spent the whole day copy-pasting the data following a format. He felt like a hero!
On getting to the office the following day, he expected everyone including his boss to greet him with a warm welcome. But Alas! His boss was furious, and when John asked what the problem is, the boss replied, “Well, yesterday you entered an incorrect trade data and this has resulted in a huge loss for the company.”
Hmm! You can see to err is human!
What many people are used to nowadays is running to the internet for any information, since they can simply copy and paste their finding. But how do you achieve a structured information for an abundant pool of data. You end up making lots of mistakes after spending lots of time and resources.
You see, that’s where web scraping finds relevance.
Benefits of web scraping to business operations
As a business owner or entrepreneur, if you’re asking, “What significant value does a web scraping tool offers my company or firm,” the following benefits will wow you!
Web scraping helps you scrape products & price for competitor analysis
There is a wide pool of products on different e-commerce channels. In fact, ironically, we can say we have more products than the human population.
Now, imagine you have access to all the product information in a database or spreadsheet. That’s what data scraping can help you achieve.
Web scrapers like Web Automation has ready-made extractors for over 400 popular websites. So you don’t have to be a programmer, and you don’t need any maintenance.
Some popular one-click extractors you can find include:
- Zillow homes sale scraper
- Ebay price scraper
- Google maps scraper
- Google search results scraper
- Yelp scraper
- Gumtree price scraper
- Airbnb price scrapers
- Alibaba product scrapers
And one interesting thing about scrapers on Web Automation is that you cannot be blocked as the scrapers have automatic IP rotation features. More so, you scrape bot protected websites and bypass CAPTCHA’s.
That said, scrapers can help you influence consumer-buying decisions as you can create a price driven strategy from data collected from competitor businesses or websites. In other words, you can set prices of your products lower than the market base price to attract price-sensitive customers.
Also, you can easily monitor products availability with the use of web scrapers. This way, you can leverage on change in stock count and availability.
Web scrapers can help for brand monitoring
Your business brand is your greatest selling point and you need to invest in it to thrive well in business. Web scrapers can help you monitor social media and other channels in a strategic manner to discover what is being talked about your product, business, customer service and anything related to your business.
Using web scrapers like Web Automation can help you fell all relevant data from various channels to help you and your executive monitor and measure your business success over time.
You can easily analyze the vast number of tweets and blog posts relating to your business and convert them into a list of actionable insights.
Web scrapers can help your business gain leads
For you to generate leads for your business, you need to collect correct up-to-date information, and web scrapers help you achieve this requirement.
It is obvious that most data on the internet is unstructured. But using a web scraper can allow you scape data from industry and niche your competitors below to. This way, you can gain access to your competition’s social accounts, forums, community portals, and other online platforms to see people following them and what these people are discussing.
Web scrapers like Web Automation can help you acquire leads, scrape reviews, build an email database, and then export all data to database or CRM. This makes life much simpler and stress-free.
If you work in or own a recruiting agency, for example, you can use web scrapers to get an idea of talents and skills your competitors are looking to hire.
Web scraper bots can collate data from job aggregation sites and save them in a necessary format to stay ahead of competitors.
Web scrapers can help you get search engine results for SEO tracking
SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and it intended to help increase website traffic and turn visitors to leads.
Web scrapers can help you collect a heap of data to understand that keywords people are searching for, what kind of contents businesses are posting, what PPC ads are running, and more. This helps to get a rough idea of what your competitors are up to.
Once you collect the needed data, you can analyze and make deductions. And then you can come up with strategies to stay ahead of competitors in your niche.
Final Remark
The main objective of every business is to make sales and web scrapers are one indispensable tools that you need if you really want to beat your competitors in business.
You don’t have to risk collecting data manually; that’s archaic and error-bound. Web scrapers are automated tools that help you extract key data to help your business make the best financial and marketing decisions.
You can use Web Automation today and take advantage of their pre-built extractors to your business advantage.