In today’s digital world web scraping has become a prominent choice of not only tech companies but also IT dilettantes. For the past three years, web scraping data businesses have seen significant growth through which companies have tried to upgrade their operations with reduced time, money, and manual efforts.
Here in this blog, we shall discuss quickly discuss the web scraping meaning and what are the benefits of web scraping for businesses.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is also named web harvesting, or web data extraction. An important point to note here is a web scraping and web crawling should not be confused. Web scraping is a programmatic analysis of a web page to download any kind of information from it, whereas, web crawling is used for the purpose of web indexing. It navigates through the piles of data and extracts whatever is relevant to your project.
Automated web scraping is performed with the use of web scraping bots. The basic aim of web scraping tools is automation that can be used for web scraping APIs and Robotic Process Automation solutions. The aggregating of data commences with going to the relevant web pages, downloading the content files, eliciting data with the use of its smart tools, and then finally saving the data to a file or a database. Sometimes, web pages are dynamic and use JavaScript to load their content. These websites require special approaches such as web scraping using javascript to gather data. It is essential to know that the data extracted from the internet by web scrapping tools is in a structured format that allows its users to gain valuable insights and downloaded it in CSV, JSON, or XML files.
Now let us follow some more important points that prove how web scraping applications are important for businesses to flourish similar to this case-study:
1. Lead Generation
Lead generation is an important marketing process that revolves around capturing and stimulating the interest of the consumers in your company’s product or service which leads to sales. Web scraping is often used to encourage lead generation. It helps the users to obtain the information of the leads e.g., name, address, phone number, and designation very quickly. It enhances the productivity of your marketing and research methods.
2. Price Monitoring
Price scraping keeps the regular check for illegal competitive pricing and tracking other relevant information that can influence price intelligence. Competitors consider this strategy to copy dynamic pricing information in real time. Web scraping for businesses can help to keep ahead of their competitors as they can set prices lower than the baseline prices in the market.
3. SEO Campaigns:
Web scraping routine in the world of SEO plays an important role. It can help you extract your and your competitor’s keyword research and determine what attracts or distracts traffic from your sites. Web scraping can also help you to improve in guest posting activities. This further helps to build a strong relationship, provides wide exposure, and improves results via backlinks. The web scraping tools can pitch rightly which may further upgrade the rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
4. Accurate Data
Web scraping extracts data directly from the source which increases the chance of accuracy. For example, in the field of financial and equity research, web scraping aggregates news and market data which can initiate market research. This further helps in making financial statements and investment decisions. Apart from this, the manufacturing and retail sectors can enhance competitors’ price monitoring and download price intelligence data from competitors’ websites with the use of web scraping business intelligence. This can be useful to keep a track of dynamic business prices. The automated web scraping tools can also help to fetch product descriptions and images for e-commerce purposes.
Wrapping up
Web scraping in the world of the internet is a wide topic. It is expected that it will keep expanding in the coming years. There are many ways businesses use web scraping to automate
different scenarios. It is just important to employ your web scraping skills accurately. You may also be interested to read another captivating write-up.
