Web Scraping is the process of fetching data from any website into a structured format like CSV and Excel. This article outlines the most popular 25 web scraping ideas to grow your business. I’m sure it will give you a lift and spark some ideas.
Web scraping ideas for Marketing
Content Marketing:
Conceiving remarkable ideas for your next blog posts to outrank your competitors is hard. Stop wasting time on glancing at Google search results page by page. You can scrape all the information including google search results into a single spreadsheet. Next, get a general idea of which topic is more likely to get ranked, and what their titles and descriptions look like.
Competitive Monitoring:
Competitive Monitoring usually needs to fetch data from multiple websites at the same time. In order to keep up the pace, you may also need to extract the information on a regular basis. Web scraping tools like Octoparse automate the entire data extraction process.
Lead Generation:
Leads are so important for any business to survive. If you are ready to scale up, the need for more leads is at stake. Stop burning your money for leads that can’t convert. Web scraping tools can scrape data across the websites.
SEO Monitoring:
Monitoring the SEO efforts by extracting keywords related results and rankings. Web scraping enables you to understand why and how your competitors can outrank your post.
Brand Monitoring:
Maintaining your online image can be tedious as you have to stare at the screen all day long. Leave the fuss to the web scraping tool. It can fetch both negative and positive posts and comments in real-time. In addition, it can help you detect fraud messages in time.
Web scraping for E-commerce/Retail Bussiness
Price Intelligence:
It’s hard to keep the customers when you raise the price, yet it’s necessary to reduce the marginal cost and elevate the profit. What is the perfect price point for your product? This is where web scraping comes in. You can extract prices under the same info from different sources. Next, pay attention to the pricing strategies deployed by others. Do they have any promotion events? Do they reduce their prices?
MAP Compliance:
When you have multiple distribution channels across different stores and countries, it’s hard to manage how they price your product. With the help of web scraping, manufacturers can extract product and price information. Thereby, it’s much easier to spot who violates MAP.
Product Intelligence:
Discovering the best selling product is challenging. Web data extraction automates the process to extract the product lists and categories, which provides insights into the top-selling products. In addition, collecting product information would benefit us to make good product assortment decisions.
Web scraping for Data Science
Natural Language Processing:
I bet you are familiar with the term NLP. In most cases, NLP is used as a means to analyze customer sentiment. web scraping is the best way to provide a continuous flow of data to feed the hungry algorithm for insights.
Machine Learning Training Models:
Machine Learning is such a buzz word these days. Basically, it implies that we throw a bunch of data into the model. Then, the model will study the patterns and build its own logic. The more data you assign to it, the more accurate the result it generates. In this regard, web data extraction is ideal to extract valuable data from multiple sources at scale in a short time frame.
Predictive Analysis:
Web scraping plays a big role in the predictive analysis as it harvests the data to predict and forecast the trends. Precise prediction helps businesses estimate the future market, discover unforeseen stakes and gain a competitive edge.
Web scraping for Equity and Financial Research
News Aggregation:
Collecting and keeping up news articles across the newspaper is an ordeal task. You can use the data extraction tool to gather news articles. Better yet, you can create a niche feed to your readers with up-to-date information by fetching RSS feeds from different blogs.
Hedge Funds:
The hedge fund industry is an early adopter of web data extraction to evaluate investment risks and potential business opportunities. As of today, the investment firms tend to spend more money on getting the data to guide investment decisions.
Financial Statement:
Collecting financial statements from many resources into a structured format can be quite daunting work. Manually going through hundreds of thousands of papers for analysis can slow you down. It won’t work in a fast-paced working environment like the finance department. Web scraping is used to collect financial reports into a usable format automatically — so important investment decisions can be made on time.
Market Research:
Conduct thorough marketing research that can help the marketing team with more effective planning. Web data extraction makes it easier to fetch data from multiple social media sites to gain insights and fuel your marketing strategy.
Web scraping for Data Journalism
It’s not writing a news report that makes it hard but discovering the truth. That is what makes data-driven journalists noteworthy. They use the scientific approach to analyze the data and information. Web data extraction gives journalists the ability to create their own database with collected information, allowing them to discover new stories from the internet.
Web scraping for Academic
We’ve all been there — scour page by page from Google Academic just to collect enough information writing the assignment. Web scraping makes the process painless as you can extract and collect relevant information into one single spreadsheet.
Web scraping for Risk management
In terms of risk management, you need a lot of records and investigative reports. In this case, it becomes difficult to create a legal database to run a background check. The easiest way is to extract criminal records, sanction lists, corporate registers, etc. The more complete information you have at hand, the more risks to reduce in advance.
Web scraping for Insurance
Web scraping helps insurance companies collect alternative data to assess the risks before writing a policy. In addition, they can analyze potential trends and adjust their insurance packages to provide better services.
Web scraping ideas for Others Businesses
Real Estate Listings:
Real estate agents can leverage web scraping tools to extract property listings from different sites. It powers the agents to gain a full picture of surrounding property information to better gauge the house value. This prepares them with up-to-date knowledge and closes more deals.
Job Board:
Want to create a job aggregate website like Indeed? Try web data extraction. You can collect job postings from the companies’ job boards. As many as you want.
Government:
There are a lot of publicly available records available online but not downloadable. Web scraping can convert information including statistical reports, press releases, table content into an excel sheet for further analysis.
Travel & Hotel
That’s quite a job to retrieve boarding and flight information across the web as their prices are largely impacted by availability. To deliver the best tour packages within the budget of the customers that satisfy their travel experiences, it is crucial to use web data extraction to gather updated information.
Sports Betting
Are you a Fantasy Football Fan? Or sports betting. You should try web scraping to scrape betting websites and compare the odds. Anyone would love low-risk betting, don’t you? Just be careful with the legal compliance on their websites before fetching the data. If you are not sure, check my blog posts: Is Web Crawling Legal?
Pharma Data:
Automatically scrape medication of all categories into structured information for the repository of information. Or getting all the pharmaceutical companies’ information to gain a competitive edge for sales or marketing teams, the web scraping enables to capture the data painlessly.
conclusion
These are just some examples of the applications of web scraping. The fact is that the potential of scraping is vast, as it is designed to retrieve web data from the internet automatically. The best part is that the data extraction tool makes this process much easier with simple drag and clicks. Check out the best 7 data extraction tools in 2023 to empower your business!
