Web Scraping and How it Can Benefit Your Business

If there’s one thing that all businesses want, it is to be successful and get more customers. Most business owners understand that they rely on data for a company to become successful. Without accurate data, it becomes challenging to make business decisions. Every process, even when starting a business, relies on information. Market research, identifying target audiences, pricing intelligence and setting up budgets are among the few aspects that business owners rely on data for.

In this digital age, there is so much information readily available at the click of a button. Those who know how to gather it can then use it to improve their businesses or even build an entirely new company, such as an aggregator business, to collect and sell public data.

This article will cover how you can use web scraping to collect data and then use parsing tools to get the information into a usable format. We’ll also mention parsing errors and how to overcome them. Finally, we’ll discuss using proxies from a reliable proxy provider like Smartproxy to keep your scraping efforts effective and secure.

Defining Web Scraping

Web scraping is often confused with web crawling, although the two processes are entirely different. Web scraping is the process of collecting data from many different websites. There are many tools such as Octoparse, Parsehub and others that automate the process and can collect large amounts of data quickly. You can then use this information to help guide your business decisions or sell to other companies as part of an aggregator business model. Web scraping of public data is completely legal and there’s no reason your business shouldn’t benefit from this information.

If you have some programming knowledge, you can also build your own web scraper using the many open-source codes that are available. Building your own web scraper means that you have more customization options but can also lead to issues such as parsing errors that need to be resolved before you can analyze or sell the collected data.

What Is Data Parsing and What’s Its Role in Scraping?

Data parsing forms an important part of web scraping. Data parsing is a process that happens after the scraper has collected all the data. The data is collected in snippets of code, and a parsing tool then converts it from this code into another format that is legible and easier to understand. Code by itself doesn’t mean much to a business that wants to know the pricing of similar products sold by competitors or fluctuations in the market. Most good web scraping tools have a built-in data parser that automatically converts the extracted data to the user’s chosen format.

If you built your own web scraper, it might not automatically include a data parser. As such, you’ll have to build a parser to use with your web scraper. Luckily, there is a lot of open-source code available to get you started.

What Are Parsing Errors?

Parsing errors occur when there is an error in the syntax of your code. This can be within the code of your web scraper or even in the code of the data that has been scraped. These parsing errors can lead to unreliable data that cannot be evaluated. As such, it is essential to know how to avoid these errors. Here are a few tips for avoiding parsing errors when web scraping:

• Keep a copy of the raw, unparsed data wherever possible.
• Check the code of your web scraper, if you built it, to ensure there aren’t issues.
• Double-check the spelling of keywords before using web scrapers.

How Can Web Scraping Benefit Your Business?

There are many benefits to using web scraping for your business. Web scraping can help you gain valuable insight into your business. You can use the collected data to help with pricing intelligence or analyzing market trends. You can also use data to keep track of your competitors and identify any opportunities they may have missed. Web scraping can even be used to improve your cyber security by identifying any potential issues or breaches.

Here is a list of areas where web scraping can help businesses:

• Brand monitoring
• Customer sentiment analysis
• Gaining Leads
• Pricing intelligence
• SEO analysis and tracking
• Monitoring trends
• Market research

Should You Use a Proxy With Your Web Scraping and Parsing Tools?

The simple answer is yes. If you want to collect large amounts of data, using a proxy will keep you safe and keep you from being tracked. Also, a residential proxy linked to an actual device’s IP address can keep you from getting banned while harvesting data. Finally, when you are scraping the web using a tool, you’ll be sending multiple requests from your IP address which can severely slow down the connection. Using a proxy allows you to send these requests without sacrificing connection speed.

Final Thoughts

Web scraping can be beneficial for any business. Whether you use the data to improve your own business or as a product to sell through your aggregator business, using a web scraping tool is effective and fast. There are many web scrapers available that you can use to start harvesting data from across the web. If combined with a proxy and data parser, you’ll soon be gathering all the data you may need to become successful.