Why Data Scraping Can Help Your Business

Why Data Scraping Can Help Your Business

Information is the lifeblood of businesses, but with trillions of bytes of data online, it is impossible to manually extract useful information from thousands of websites, news channels, business directories, web forums and review sites. You could pay a team of people to search for mentions of your company and its products, but this is time consuming and you would only see a fraction of the data out there. Using an automated data-scraping tool is a more effective method.

Why Data Scraping Can Help Your Business

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Online Reputation Management

Reputation is very important in business. Disparaging mentions and poor reviews posted online can seriously hurt your business, so it pays to be alive to any data that casts your business in a negative light. Web extraction software can trawl web pages and retrieve information pertaining to your business, good or bad, so you can ensure your reputation remains untarnished.

Fraudulent reviews are a good example of how your online reputation can be trashed by an unscrupulous competitor or disgruntled ex-employee. People look online for reviews before they use a company, so fake reviews can have a huge impact on businesses. Web scraping software will help you detect fraudulent reviews, so you can have them blocked. It can also help you find positive reviews, which you can link to if desired.

Price Comparison

Does your business sell a range of competitively priced products and services? If so, a data-scraping tool will be invaluable. For example, say you are in the travel business and you sell flights and hotel rooms. If your flights and hotel bookings are more expensive than a competitor’s products, you will miss out, but if you can harvest data and see up-to-the-minute prices, you can match them and gain business.

Information scraped from millions of websites will ensure your business remains competitive at all times, particularly when it comes to special promotions. It will also help you inform your buying strategies if you sell a large catalogue of products, as you might be able to spot a gap in the market.

SEO

A strong SEO strategy is very important if you want to achieve a good position in the search engine rankings. You can use data scraping to check who your competitors are for whichever keywords you are targeting. This will help you determine what to do to boost user engagement and build links.

Ad Targeting

Data scraping is useful for analyzing customer behavior. Use data scraped from thousands of websites to help you figure out what your customers want to see, so you can make your online ads more effective.

Generate Sales Leads

If you are in the B2B sales market, you can use web extraction data to provide leads for your sales team. Scrape data from business directories and use it to generate useful sales leads. There is tons of information online, including information about a company’s key employees, telephone numbers, email addresses, etc. This information can be uploaded into databases or spreadsheets and then passed over to sales personnel.

Data scraping is a powerful way of generating useful information for business growth. Let us know if you have used it to propel your business to success.