
Many people ask themselves the question, how do I improve in the areas covered below. In a lot of the cases it's important to know that web scraping plays a major role in it and that it's actually rather easy to get started.

With web scraping you can extract data from any website and as some may say "Data is the new gold". There is so much important data to be gathered from websites that you can make great business decisions on.

Below are our 11 usages for web scraping and why you should start scraping now.

## Build your new product

No Code tools are on a rise. They allow you to create certain flows, analyze data, create stunning websites and more without any knowledge of coding. You don't have to be a technical founder anymore to start a business. But what many people don't know about web scraping is that you can leverage it to use that data as input to your new application. For example, you want to create [a mobile application that shows the latest cryptocurrency prices](/build-your-first-crypto-app-using-amazon-honeycode/)? No problem, it only takes an hour.

## SEO

Having organic growth is next to direct traffic, the biggest source of traffic coming to your website. Sadly it's also the hardest one to optimize for. It requires a lot of persistence, monitoring and analyzing to get ranked among the top. Even when you're at the top you still have to optimize for click throughs on your links. Tough business! Luckily this is where web scraping is very powerful. It can help to decrease your workload and automate some tasks for you. For example:

- Help you [track the ranking of your website for your specific keywords](/build-your-first-crypto-app-using-amazon-honeycode/)
- Identify and monitor keywords of competitors by getting a daily list
- Analyze the top ranking keywords and alternatives for you

and a lot more.

## Dataset creation

One of the big tasks of a data scientist, computer vision specialist and others that need data is the creation of a trustworthy and well composed dataset. Web scraping can take any website list and compose it into a usable data stream that you can build on top of. If you have a great tool like [Scraper.AI](https://scraper.ai) you can also [monitor that data](/how-to-create-a-hourly-updating-covid-19-dataset-under-5-minutes/) and keep your dataset up-to-date in the land of fast changing data.

## Competitor tracking

Knowing the competition is one of the most valuable techniques there is. It helps you to connect to your audience but also makes you stay on top of your sector. Having a web scraper and being to extract the prices of a webshop of your competitor ensures you that you can be the cheapest out there.

For beginning startups they can for example monitor new comers in their space and see what approach they're taking. It might mean that they've found product market fit.

## Discovery

Where it all starts, the starts with is replaced with a fancy arrow (➜)

- Starting a business ➜ Discovering an idea
- Getting started with SEO ➜ Discovering keywords
- Knowing your competition ➜ Discovering your competitors
- Investing ➜ Discovering what to invest in
- Buying a property ➜ Discovering a property
- Making money on stocks ➜ Discovering what stocks to buy
- ...

This list can go on for a long while, an action almost always starts with the discovery of something. Discovering means that you want to get the data that justifies the decision you're gonna take to get to that action.

You might want to [watch stock websites](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6YWbFoaruI) to get to learn about price changes of your favourite stock. 

Web scraping can get these latests stocks, properties, and many more.

## Product monitoring

You're a vendor, dropshipper, amazon seller or anyone that sells a product. A major part will be making sure that you're product fulfills certain demands. You want to watch for reviews, correct pricing, advertising, ... it's a lot of work.

Scraping reviews ensures that you can sustain you're high rating, act on low ratings and make sure that they get resolved correctly. Watching prices from competitors, analyzing your advertising metrics in one dashboard. They can all be automated with web scraping. In essence you're making your personalized software product.

## Marketing automation

Finding potential influencers becomes a lot easier, you can go to instagram, facebook, quora, ... and get a list of comments or profiles with most views, likes, watches. The only thing you have to do is open up the scraper, select the names and you're ready to go. Most websites don't show emails anymore due to privacy reasons, but you can private message them or use some other tools to get the email for that user.

![](./1.png)

## Lead generation

A great way to get interesting prospects for your business is generating leads. As soon as you have leads you can setup a sales pipeline and get these leads converted to customers. 

### Getting the leads

But getting these leads is not always straightforward. You first need to find your audience. Luckily there are already great tools out there like LinkedIn search, yellow pages, google maps, angellist, producthunt, ... They all have one thing in common. They show you a list of leads. Great! Because this means we can extract the data from that list and convert it to something usable for us, an excel file, csv, ... anything we need to get these leads converted and expand our business. 

<a href="https://scraper.ai?utm_source=blog" rel="Get started"><img src="/images/CTA_1024_100_Get_Started.jpg" alt="Get Started"/></a>

## Investment optimization

As a Venture Capital firm you might be interested in startups that were backed by others VCs, you can just go to their page, spend an hour or so per day and get that list. Or you can scrape and monitor them. You can extract the data every day and get notified when a new startup gets added.

By also combining this with dataset creation you can go in the history of a startup and minimize the risk you take in investing in a startup.

![](./2.png)

## Finance

Stocks, crypto, personal finances and more are something everyone has touched at least once. But it involves a lot of manual labour.

Cryptocurrency or stock investors might find themselves looking at listing sites hourly to get the latest prices and volumes. Monitoring these could come in handy and web scrapers can get you this information in no time, leaving you with more time to do the analysis. Some services also offer direct API endpoints making it as easy to integrate as possible

Your personal finances are important, you can scrape them and get notified when a bill comes through, a salary gets deposited and more. Become aware of any event that happens at any time.

## Real estate monitoring

Buying a property can be painful, there are plenty of listing sites, aggregators, agents and more and they all have their own time schedule. And when a property gets listed it's a race to get there as the first potential buyer.

Automate this process and let it scrape every hour to get a list of new additions or updates and make sure that you're among the first to get there. Among the first I say because there are others doing exactly the same! 

## Summary

Web scraping is not new and has proven to be valuable. It can automate time-consuming tasks and leave you with more time in hand to focus on the exact problem you're trying to solve. Being from analyzing data to buying a property. Extracting data from the web has never been this easy and should be a must-do to get most out of your business.

## Resources

- [Track your SEO rankings](/track-your-seo-rankings-with-these-simple-tricks/)
- [Automate SEO with content scrapers](https://neilpatel.com/blog/automate-seo-with-content-scrapers/)
- [Create an updating dataset under 5 minutes](/how-to-create-a-hourly-updating-covid-19-dataset-under-5-minutes/)
- [Make a crypto app using Amazon HoneyCode](/build-your-first-crypto-app-using-amazon-honeycode/)

---

Hey 👋, My name is Maxim from [https://scraper.ai](https://scraper.ai/). Let us know what you think in the comments below


11 usages for web scraping


How high you rank in the search engines is important for your business. Having a high ranking for certain keywords can drive immense traffic to your website without having to buy advertisement. It’s a great way to increase adoption of your product. As a business owner you want to stay up-to-date with your SEO rankings to be at the top results and be the first they click on when searching for that type of product.

Today we’ll show some pitfalls of SEO and how we can optimize and automate our rankings to get most out of our SEO and get the organic growth flowing in.

### SEO Today

Nowadays ranking algorithms have adapted a lot and it’s not always straightforward to rank number one. In 2019 for example, Google launched its new BERT algorithm which got a lot of attention as every SEO professional needed to, and probably still has, to learn the tricks on how to optimize for BERT. While before you could go through with optimizing keyword usage, it’s now also about the positioning of these keywords and if the content you serve is relevant.

Next to this technical scores also play a role, think of mobile optimization, optimal network delivery, UX changes. For example, Google will also look on how much your page moves when visiting (because of cookie banners, wrong image heights, …). Luckily there are tools like Google Search Console, Lighthouse and many more that help us with this.

### Google Search Console

The [Google search console](https://search.google.com) is your new go to address for tracking your SEO changes. It includes a lot of relevant information to get started with getting this high ranking in the first place. A good rule of thumb here (and perhaps most of the time) is, is it red? Then it needs fixing. Everything that is red, being from a page with an error or errors in vitality will impact your ranking thus costing you a lot of potential income.

#### Setup

At first you’ll have to validate that you own the site, there are several ways to do this. We used the DNS record as it’s easy to remove afterwards and doesn’t require a re-deploy. If you don’t have the technical know-how you can always ask your site admin to do this for you.

After setting the search console up for the first time it’s ideal to submit your sitemaps, this will help Google identify the pages that need to be crawled and will ensure that your pages get taken up in their crawling database. From then on it’s a waiting game, crawling takes time, try to get it (rather) correct from the first time.

#### Performance

The search console also has a great Performance dashboard that includes how many impressions and clicks you get for each keyword. It can be that some keywords are included that you might not optimize for, but that’s okay!

An important metric here is the Clicks VS Impressions ratio. When the impressions are high and the Clicks are low, it can be because of a few reasons:

- Your site is low ranked
- The Title, Description don’t invite to be clicked

Luckily we’ll learn further on how we can track this.

### Search engines

There are many search engines out there, however, optimizing for the the top three targets more than 96%! of the total search engine. The top 3 is Google, Bing and Yahoo!. As you might have guessed, Google takes the crown with a massive 91% usage. Which is incredible and makes single targeting Google worthwhile.

![](./1.png)

The image shows the total usage of the search engines from June 2020, credits to statscounter.

Here we clearly see that optimizing **SEO specifically for Google** is very important! Imagine being number 1 for a keyword that 91% of the people who browse the internet use!

Luckily Google is also the provider with the best toolset to get the SEO optimization done right!

### The difficulty

#### **The BERT algorithm**

It’s new, it’s shiny, and… nobody knows it well… Introduced in 2019, it’s still something that we don’t know how to optimize 100% for. There are some great tutorials out there that tell you more about it.

#### Identifying keywords

You probably want to identify keywords to increase organic growth and get these clicks rolling in. But how do you identify the keyword that will thrive these clicks? There are a lot of better tutorials out there to identify keywords, so i’ll leave it up to them, to name a few:

- [https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo](https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo)
- [https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/](https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/)
- [https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-basics/](https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-basics/)

#### Staying up-to-date with rankings

Google crawls the web many many times a day and your rankings potentially change daily. This means that for each keyword you won’t always know your ranking and will have to search it every day, over and over again. You could outsource this, but you still need the analysis. So how do you stay up-to-date with what Google or Bing is showing?

### The solution

This is where **Web Scraping** comes in, it’s a very simple way to check your ranking every hour, day or however frequent you want.

For example, over at Scraper.AI we want to rank #1 for certain keywords. One of these is “ai scraper”. But it took a while to get there, daily checking all our keywords would just be a pain, so that’s why we automated this process.

We when to the URL where we monitor our keyword, in Google we ended up with something like this: [https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+scraper](https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+scraper) while the bing alternative is [https://www.bing.com/search?q=ai+scraper](https://www.bing.com/search?q=ai+scraper)

#### Scraping Search results

Selecting results could be as easy as in the following screenshot. In this case we launched the Scraper.AI extension, went to “Select element” and hovered over the items we were interested in. In this case we wanted all non-ad URLs, Titles and Descriptions. If you want more than ten results, you can also hit the page selector and click the next page button.

![](./2.png)

I’m interested in the Title, URL and Description of the rankings

Now i can get daily updates of my results, and check how my SEO changes to my webpage are affecting my ranking. For Scraper.AI we take the delta of the ranking after scraping to see this increase.

We also took the description to see why our competition is potentially doing better. This way we get a better understanding of the competition and might get an insight in which keywords they’re using and score well for.

#### Scraping the Google Search Console

Next to the results, it’s also very relevant to get the Performance for each keyword. Let’s head over to the Google Search Console, go to the Performance tab and start scraping that list. Some of the most relevant metrics here are:

- The last update time, so we know when these metrics were updated
- The queries, to get our keywords
- The countries, perhaps we need some localization?
- The devices, might want to optimize more for mobile or tablet?
- Dates, optional, in case you want to make a fancy graph yourself. Though we can also just scrape the graph image 😃

![](./3.png)

An example of a Google Search Console

This is where most scrapers fall out, scraping pages that require authentication is not always supported and will require you to send cookies. Luckily, over at [Scraper.AI](https://scraper.ai) we support authenticated page scraping.

We always recommend to log in as a user that has the least permission needed in order to complete the task. At respective companies like ourselves the data is heavily encrypted and stored away, but having this least permission approach will increase security even more.

#### Ironing out the errors

While we’re in the search console, it’s very helpful to also identify the errors that might arise. For example, our sitemap is rather important. Head over to Sitemaps and scrape the table of submitted sitemaps. This way we can track automatically when something goes wrong and the amount of URLs a sitemap contains.

### Summary

A lot has changed in the SEO world, and a lot of manual work is involved in order to get that number one spot and be the king/queen of a specific search result. Only then will you be able to get the most traffic for that keyword. Afterwards it’s up to you to convert that traffic in to paid users!

In order to track changes to your SEO rankings, a lot of manual tasks and time was needed. Web scraping can decrease the work and time considerably and should be seen as a great technique for your workflow.

Not only can we track the increase of keyword hits, we can also track the errors and optimize our SEO results

---

Hey 👋, My name is Maxim from [https://scraper.ai](https://scraper.ai/). Let us know what you think in the comments below

<a href="https://scraper.ai?utm_source=blog" rel="Get started"><img src="/images/CTA_1024_100_Get_Started.jpg" alt="Get Started"/></a>