13 Ways to Use Web Scraping Tools
Consider the amount of raw data floating around the internet: webpages made up of text, images, videos, graphics, memes, infographics, and more. It’s mind-boggling when you slow down and think about it.
The latest estimate puts the total number of websites atroughly one billion, with new ones added and old ones disappearing all the time. Each second, there are approximately7548 tweets,772 Instagram photosposted,2,573,338 emails sent, and42,943GB of internet traffic… to name just a few.
According to Cisco,global internet traffic hit 1.1 zettabytes per year(a zettabyte is one sextillion bytes, or the same as 36,000 years of HD video) at the end of 2016, and will cross the 2.3 zettabytes threshold by 2020.
Overall, the internethas nearly doubled in size every yearsince 2012.
So, yes. It’s big. And there’s a lot of data.
That data can be harnessed to help with a wide variety of things if you know how to do it. You could navigate from site to site, from page to page, picking and choosing the details you need for whatever it is you’re doing, and copying the relevant information to another file or spreadsheet before moving on to the next website, page, or paragraph.
That’s Option A, or what we might call the “Classic Method” (classic because you really had no choice) – slow, laborious, and tedious.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the art of web scraping.
Also known as web harvesting, data mining, screen scraping, and (web) data extraction,web scrapingis the removal of large amounts of data from a website, which is then saved to a local file on a computer, database, or spreadsheet.
It automates the process of copying and pasting selected sections of a page or an entire website to be reviewed and analyzed later from one convenient place.
Web scraping tools firstfetch– download the page for viewing like a web browser does – and thenextractthe chosen data – which may be copied, parsed, searched, and reformatted. Many tools allow you to collect data from hundreds or thousands of URLs at the same time (or in scheduled sequence).
Basically, any data that can be viewed online – even behind a login wall (provided you have the proper credentials) – can be scraped.
“But why?” you might well ask. What’s the big deal, and what are some of the things you can do with the scraped data?
They say that knowledge is power, and in 2017, knowledge comes increasingly in the form of digital data sets. The more you have, the better your decisions, plans, tactics, strategies, and success.
So how can you use data scraping tools? Here are just a few of the ways.
It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, whether it’s a product or a service, whether it’s something everyone could use or designed for a very small and exclusive niche; if you want to succeed and grow your business, you need to market.
And in 2017 and beyond, that means promoting online and working with digital data. According to Hubspot’s annual State of Inbound report,65% of marketers say generating traffic and leadsis their biggest challenge.
Web scraping can help with both. Let’s look at the traffic issue first.
Traffic coming to a website canarrive from a variety of channels, including direct, paid, social, email, and referral.
For many, though, it’s organic search – traffic originating from a search engine inquiry – that serves up the biggest slice of the pie. And as luck would have it, this traffic often tends to be the most relevant and highest converting (because they went looking for something you have or know).
There are several ways you canboost your organic search traffic, but they all ultimately have to do with yoursearch engine optimization(SEO).
Enter web scraping. With it, you can scrape SERPs for SEO management, and take your SEO analysis up a notch (or two).
First, you can track your page ranks over time by scraping the various search engine result pages for your given keyword or query.
