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Web scraping project ideas: what the savviest businesses are doing with data

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Web scraping refers to the process of extracting relevant data from websites, usually in an automated manner. If you’re looking to get started on a web scraping project, or you’re looking for ways to leverage data scraping in your business, here are some examples of cool web scraping ideas that you can try out.

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Web scraping is a technique used to extract large amounts of data from websites and save onto your computer in a database or time table format. There are many reasons businesses would use this information for lead generation, SEO, or to better understand their customers.

Price Monitoring and Comparison

Price monitoring and comparison is a common application of web scraping for businesses. Businesses use web scraping to monitor their competitors’ prices so that they can keep their own prices competitive at all times. Some manufacturing companies use data scraping to monitor retailers to ensure that they’re not listing their products below the Minimum Advertised Price.

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You can also automate the process of checking prices on eCommerce sites by writing and deploying a web scraping script. For example, if you’re waiting for the price of a particular item to drop to a certain level, you can create a simple script that’ll email you once the price reaches your specified amount.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is another practical use of web scraping. Rather than buying names and contact info from list brokers, many businesses are now using web scraping techniques to harvest the contact information of potential leads from websites. 

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Lead generation using web scraping is very effective and enables businesses to obtain useful insight into their target audience. In order to crawl websites more reliably and to get around restrictions and bans, many businesses use dedicated proxies for web scraping.

Job Aggregation

At any given time, there are a lot of individuals looking for jobs and also a good number of vacancies across many institutions and businesses. Job aggregation refers to the process of bringing together job listings from the many job boards on the internet into one place where job seekers can find them easily. Job aggregator sites can help companies to find suitable recruits faster and also help job seekers to easily find employment opportunities. 

Review Scraping

Most businesses benefit from evaluating reviews from their customers. Doing so enables them to keep track of what their customers think about their products and services. As a result, many companies use web scraping techniques to retrieve data from social media and review sites.

If you want to work on a web scraping project, you could write a web scraper that collects reviews from sites such as Trustpilot or Yelp. You could then process such data into a format that will be suitable for businesses looking for an easy way to access customer reviews. 

SEO Monitoring

Search engine optimization is an effective digital marketing strategy that many companies use to ensure that their websites get a lot of high-quality traffic from search engines. Web scraping can be used to monitor the results of SEO strategies. This can help businesses to find out what types of content receive the most engagement from users and what keywords provide the best SEO results.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a lot of nice web scraping projects you can try out. With a bit of technical know-how, you can easily extract and leverage the huge amounts of data on the web for your personal and business needs.

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