Whenever a piece of information is required, people or organizations turn to the internet, which hosts unlimited data that is just a click away. But it does require time, effort and sometimes even money, to access certain information, although most can be accessed for free. In this setting, web scraping is an automated data gathering technique that allows users to access vast chunks of data easily.
Web scraping has become a crucial part of the big data industry since it gives access to information, like contact details of potential clients, pricing data for price comparison websites, and more, which can be used by business organizations. The year 2019 has seen substantial growth in web scraping activities through which organizations tried to upscale their operations.
What follows in this article are some points about how web scraping helps organizations to grow their businesses.
Price Monitoring
Pricing is probably the most crucial strategy that an organization needs to focus on. It is hard to predict the price for which a product should sell, since it needs to be kept at a level at which consumers can buy, and at the same time, allow organizations to make a profit. With similar products in the market from several competitors, it is hard to arrive at an appropriate price. In a scenario like this, web scraping does the job.
Using web scraping, an organization can scrape through the prices set by rival organizations on the same product and analyze that data to set the cost of their products that will ensure a sale and in turn, help generate profit.
Lead Generation
Lead generation helps an organization tap leads which could result in the conversion to potential sales and is considered important. Web scraping is often used to draw leads and finds solutions for the sales agent. It can scrape all the information from the social media of the organization, rival organization’s information sources and other hotspots with high lead activity.
It makes the entire process faster as lead information, such as name, designation, email address and phone numbers, are acquired quickly. When a business organization is looking forward to scaling up, it is the lead that is at stake, and it is advisable to not invest in leads that cannot be converted.
Equity & Financial Research
To begin with, it is a daunting task for anyone to collect financial reports from various sources in an organized format. Going through thousands of papers manually is not a wise idea in a fast-paced environment, like the financial departments of organizations. Web scraping can be put to good use here to collect financial data and present it in a usable format automatically, due to which, crucial financial decisions can be taken on time.
Talking about funds, hedge funds have been into web scraping for a long time since it is important for them to carefully evaluate a company’s present stance to evaluate business risks and potential investment opportunities. Funds are granted only after a significant amount of time is spent on web scraping to derive various forms of data about an organization.
Maintaining Identity
Maintaining identity is a tough job to handle since it takes years of hard work to turn an organization into a brand, but mere moments to lose it all. Due to this, all organizations need to keep an eye on any negative comments or reviews that may be floating on the web about them. It should be kept in mind that investors are always on the lookout for a potential partner. An organization might deserve the investment, but one bad review can ruin their chances.
Web scraping can be beneficial in this regard as it can easily scrape all the fraud and poor reviews and eliminate them swiftly. This action needs to be conducted regularly to keep negative reviews at bay.
Enhancing SEO Activities
It is common knowledge that SEO plays an important role to ensure products and services are ranked high when searched for using the right keywords. But it is a tough job to find the right keywords, since there are several similar products with the same features in the market. Web scraping solves this issue by scraping through the common keywords that have already been used. Web scraping can also scrape a rival organization’s information to figure out the keywords used by them. This way, one can use different and unique keywords to create a positive impact on the SEO strategy.
