For any business, data takes the center stage to fuel business decisions today. From 2010 to 2020, the amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world increased from 1.2 trillion gigabytes to 59 trillion gigabytes, which shows a growth of almost 5,000%. The primary source of data is the internet with more than 5 billion users generating 2 quintillions of data each day. Analysis of this web data can help businesses to uncover insights and have vital information to foster their business operations & make intelligent business decisions. But the question is, how to do it? For this, web data scraping service is the ultimate solution! Continue reading to find out all important aspects of web scraping, including what it is, why it matters, how it works, & how can it benefit your business in 2021.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping or sometimes also referred to as web crawling is the automated identification and retrieval or extraction of data from websites. Once this information is collected it is then exported into a format that is more useful for the user. Although web scraping can be done manually, nowadays automated tools are preferred to scrape web data that saves huge costs and works at a faster rate. The web scraping process involves making requests to the page and extracting machine-readable information from it.
Web scraping primarily needs two parts: the crawler and the scraper. The crawler refers to an artificial intelligence algorithm that browses the web to search the particular data required by following the links across the internet. On the other hand, a scraper is a specific tool that is created to extract the data from the website. The scraper’s design may vary as per the project’s complexity and scope so that it can quickly and accurately extract the data.
The web scraping process empowers businesses to automate their web data collection processes by bots or automated scripts known as “web crawlers”. The prominence and need for web scraping services & web data extraction services have multiplied beyond measure as web scrapers provide every bit of information available out there needed for your business. Regardless of the industry, you are in, web scraping is essential to drive your profits up & help you make intelligent business decisions, based on the data analytics insights gained by the data collected from this process.
How does web scraping work?
The web scraping process is somewhat complex in nature. Web scraper’s main primary goal is to understand the structure of a website and extract the data needed and export it as a whole new format such as spreadsheet format, JSON, among others. Oftentimes, web scrapers are provided with a specific URL or a whole list from which companies need to scrape data from. Then the scraper either extracts all the data on the page or selects the specific data that needs to be extracted. Lastly, the scraper runs and lets the user download the data as an Excel sheet or other formats.
The web scraping process involves a series of steps including:
- Identification of target URLs
- In case the website to be crawled makes use of anti-scraping tools, the scraper may need to choose the appropriate proxy server in order to get a new IP address to send its requests from.
- Make requests to the targeted URLs to obtain HTML code
- Use locators for identifying the location of data in HTML code
- Analyze the data string that contains information into logical insights
- Convert the scraped data into the desired format such as a spreadsheet, JSON, etc.
- Transfer the scraped data to the data storage of choice
Why is it important?
The unprecedented events of 2020 have profoundly impacted the digital trends across the world. The disruption caused by COVID-19 has brought insightful data to the center stage, driving organizations to redefine their digital strategies and adapt to the market shifts and rely on data intelligence. Now that there is an increasing reliance on data analytics solutions and automation among businesses, web scraping can enable both. Along with these reasons, web scraping has numerous applications that can affect all industries by enabling businesses to:
- Automate data collection process from the internet
- Unlock web data sources
- Make data-driven business decisions
How can Web Scraping help businesses in 2021?
Though the list of things that web scraping is used for is almost endless, but here are some ways how web scraping can help businesses:
1. Sentiment Analysis
The sentiment analysis technique is employed by businesses to analyze customers’ behavior and attitude towards different products and services. This technique uses a considerable amount of data to function. Web scraping can automate the extraction process faster which saves tons of time and effort for such mundane work. Since users come across & react to different products & services on websites & social media platforms, there is huge data available like reviews, tweets, opinions, etc. that can be scraped to help you gain insights into business, competitors, potential opportunities, and trends. This will help you in analyzing & creating products that people desire and moving ahead of their competition.
2. Price Monitoring
In an oligopolistic & price-sensitive market, setting up the right prices and keeping an eye on how much your product is priced across the competitors is crucial. Monitoring competitor’s prices and setting up prices for your products & services is never easy. With market competition at its peak, web scraping services are extremely helpful for these purposes. When you hire a data scraping expert, you can scrap the product data for your competing products to gain insights into pricing strategies and influence consumer-buying decisions. This way you can attract price-sensitive customers by setting prices of the products they surf by setting a price lower than the market base price and optimize revenue in the process.
3. AI & Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning today is impacting almost every business function & are transforming businesses like never before. However, Machine learning needs continuous feeds of quality data to emulate and replicate a human. They need to constantly be fed with the latest piece of information and data so they can keep adapting, and this is where web scraping helps. Since the quality of your ML models largely depends on the quality of data used, you can employ web scraping to collect it from various websites. Web data scraping service providers can help you scrape a large number of data points, text, and images to aid Machine learning models & algorithms.
4. Brand Monitoring
Every business wants to know their brand’s worth & continuously improve its brand reputation, isn’t it? This can be attained using web scraping services! The services can help you strategically monitor social media and other channels to discover what is being talked about your brand, its products, customer service, and anything explicitly connected to your business. Data scraping services can fetch relevant data from various channels to help you monitor and measure and track your success over time. It furthermore helps you to draw comparisons with your competitors, analyze tweets and blog posts, and provide actionable insights.
5. SEO
Staying on top of search results is only getting difficult every year. As the last year saw tectonic shifts in SEO trends and SEO updates, businesses are striving hard to improve their ranks on search engines, get more traffic & ultimately have more conversions. Thus, if you are working towards SEO, you probably use tools such as SEMrush or Ubersuggest that highly rely on web crawling and scraping. With web scraping services, you can figure the title tags, keywords that your competitors are targeting and figure out what is redirecting traffic to their websites and driving sales.
6. Lead Generation
Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of any business. The fundamental requirement for lead generation is collecting the right data & information, that can be attained with web scraping services! As most data on the internet is unstructured, you can choose your industry and develop a web scraping tool to scrape your competition’s social accounts, community portals, event boards, real estate portals, forums, and other online platforms. Web scraping tools can help to acquire high-quality leads, build an email database, scrape reviews and then export data to your CRM or database
7. Market Research
Web scraping is increasingly being used by companies for market research. Since data is an integral part of any research, web scraping services can help you get relevant data for your market research. Your web scraping service provider can help you gather structured data from multiple sources over the Internet with ease. This high-quality web scraped data obtained in large volumes can be very helpful for you in analyzing market scenarios, consumer trends, and ongoing market shifts to understand which direction the company should move in the future.
8. Investment opportunities
As a business owner, you always want to know about promising options to invest in. web scraping services dig deep into sources & websites to provide you with valuable information. Through customized solutions by web scraping service providers, you can fetch relevant data & get insights about potential opportunities, extracting the valuable inputs from different news stories, headlines, etc. for converting them into actionable investment insights and make investment decisions based on the same.
Looking for reliable web Scraping Services?
At SunTec India we have been offering high-quality data scraping services for over 25+ years across the globe. We are specialized in designing all the custom crawlers that can crawl millions of websites and extract valuable data in a most faster, reliable, and accurate manner. With dedicated teams, the latest data scraping tools, and the best methodologies, we help you find precisely what you need in your desired file format.
When you outsource website data scraping services to SunTec India, you get the advantage of custom-built solutions that exceed your expectations. Our data experts have years of experience in web crawling, mapping diverse verticals, and leading cutting-edge scraping systems for crawling websites, ensuring fast turnaround time, and cost-effective services with optimum focus on accuracy. Other than data scraping services, we offer a full suite of data management services, data processing services & data entry services designed to fuel business growth and boost business performance.
To discuss your requirements, get in touch with us at info@suntecindia.com
