Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites.The web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler.
- Web Scraping Business Ideas: Start a Business by Scraping Data from the Web Web Scraping is a powerful tool. So powerful indeed, that you could build an entire business based around scraping data from the internet. After all, data has value.
- Web scraping enables businesses to take unstructured data on the world wide web and turn it into structured data so that it can be consumed by their applications, providing significant business value Trusted by 76 out of Fortune 500 companies for workflow automation and data collection.
- From news to websites to social media to blogs, and limitless other Scrape Data from Website – The best option for growing businesses - Data scraping is useful for every business when it comes to aggregating data from the internet.
In today’s world, there is an abundance of public information on the internet. With over 100 million websites throughout the world, anyone can access this information.
Many entrepreneurs, marketers and data analysts use this information to make valuable decisions to help them grow their company.
At ParseHub, our goal is to help you make better decisions, and in order for you to make better decisions, you need data.
Collecting the right data manually for your business’ growth can be a tedious process and may not always be the most accurate. Phone for mac.
That’s where using web scraping tool can make the process more efficient and effective. You can extract online data in just a matter of minutes.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping or also known as web harvesting is a powerful tool that can help you collect data online and transfer the information in either an excel, CSV or JSON file to help you better understand the information you’ve gathered.
Web scraping is incredibly common and can be used to create APIs out of almost any website.
If you want to learn more, you can read our guide on What is Web Scraping and what it’s used for.
Is Web Scraping Legal?
With you being able to extract public information off of competitors or other websites, is web scraping legal?
Any information or data that is publicly available that can be accessed by everyone on the internet and can be legally extracted.
Web Scraping Business Plan
The data has to follow these 3 criteria for it to be legally extracted:
- User has made the data public
- No account required for access
- Not blocked by robots.txt file
As long as it follows these 3 rules, it's legal!
You can learn more about the rules of web scraping here: Is web scraping legal?
For now, we’ll get into how you can use web scraping like ParseHub, a free web scraper, to grow your business.
How Web Scraping Can Help Grow Your Business
For businesses to make effective decisions, they need the proper data to make the best decisions to grow their brand. There are 4 ways web scraping can help your business:
- Collect industry insights
- Generate leads
- Competitor analysis
- Brand reputation management
Collect Industry Insights
Information to see how companies in certain industries are performing will not only allow you to make proper stock investment choices, but you can also use this as an opportunity to choose what niche/ industry to expand your products or services to.
For example, say you’re a reservation app for restaurants. With COVID-19 having an impact on the service industry, you can use a web scraping tool to collect data on other industries like the medical industry, to see if your reservation app can expand into a booking appointment app as well!
Check out how you can use ParseHub to collect industry insights
Generate Leads
Many online directories like Yellow Pages and Yelp have many businesses that are in your target market and interested in your product or service.
Web scraping allows you to grab valuable information like business name, contact info, location and industry to help you create a list of qualified leads a lot faster! You can then use this list to outreach to qualified leads within any city or country. This is ideal for B2B or lead generation companies.
We have a guide on how you can scrap data from yellow pages and use it to your advantage.
Also, check out:
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis will help you gain a better understanding of what exactly your competitors are doing. You can see what their marketing plan is, the prices they have, reputation etc.
For example, say you’re an e-commerce website and you want to see what your competitors are pricing their products, reviews, and sales or discounts. You can use this information for your purchasing process and your business plan!
You can also grab valuable information like titles and meta descriptions to possibly see their targeted keywords. You could also scrape their blog to give you ideas of what to write about. This all helps improve your SEO.
We have several links you can read to help you complete a proper competitor analysis:
Brand Reputation Management
Social media has become an important part of a marketing plan. One important factor of social media is to see what people are saying about your brand and this can be done by searching for your brand name on social media.
You can efficiently collect these posts to see what people are saying about your brand name. If it's great, continue with what you’re doing and keeping building a great brand reputation.
If it’s bad or needs improvement, you can do some damage control and improve this before it gets any worse!
You can also grab your online reviews from major sites like Yelp and Amazon. You can use these reviews to help you make any adjustments in the future, or can even help you resolve any issues past customers have had.
Closing Thoughts
There are many ways web scraping can help with your business. Everyday many businesses are finding creative ways to use ParseHub to grow their business! Brand reputation, industry performance, lead generation and competitor analysis are only a few of the ways you can use web scraping to help grow your brand!
How will you use ParseHub?
Happy Scraping!
Web Scraping is a powerful tool.
So powerful indeed, that you could build an entire business based around scraping data from the internet.
After all, data has value. Specially if you can turn that data into valuable insights for other people.
Today, we will go over some business ideas based around web scraping. Capture one 20.
What is Web Scraping?
First, a quick review of the basics. What is web scraping in the first place?
Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from a website into a new format. In most cases, web scrapers will export data into an Excel Spreadsheet or JSON file.
By using a web scraper, you can essentially build an API for any data set on the web. Be it product data from an eccomerce website, stock prices from a finance website, or more.
Want to learn more? Read our guide on web scraping and what it is.
Web Scraping Business Ideas
Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of things. Here are some web scraping business ideas.
Keep in mind, there are hundreds of uses for web scraping. These are just some ideas to get your thoughts going.
Price Comparison / Tracking Platforms
A very popular use of web scraping comes from Price Comparison and Price Tracking platforms.
You could set up a web scraper to pull product details and pricing from multiple retailers and display them on one single website. Allowing users to find the best retailer to buy a specific product.
You can also use this approach to also provide pricing history for products, letting users know if the current price of a product is the lowest its been sold for.
Lead Generation
Web Scraping Business Development
Web Scraping can also be used for lead generation. Either in the B2C or B2B sectors.
You could use web scraping to build high-quality leads lists for all kinds of businesses. Of course, you wouldn’t want to tackle this project lightly.
Check out our guide on using web scraping for lead generation.
Web Listing Aggregators
Web listing aggregators are great businesses that rely on web scraping. The best part of this concept is that it is extremely versatile.
You could create an aggregator website for job listings, real estate, automotive listings and much more.
It’s all about finding a niche of listings that can draw the attention of enough people that can find it useful.
Financial and Marketing Analysis
Is Web Scraping Legal
You can use web scraping to extract large amounts of data from all sorts of industries.
These datasets can then be data-mined to extract valuable industry or market insights. These can then be sold to companies in said industries. Or you could run these analyses on-demand for your clients.
This might be one of the most involved and complex ideas on the list, but also one of the most profitable.
Sports Data Service
Sports data is huge and can be interpreted in many different ways.
With web scraping, you can extract data from all sorts of sports and leagues to collect them all in one place. Be it for further analysis or for sports betting.
How to get started with Web Scraping
At this point, you might be ready to get started on a new web scraping business.
But how do you get started?
Luckily, web scraping is way easier than you’d think and we’ve put together the perfect resource to get started.
Check out our guide on how to start scraping data from the web with a free web scraper.