Amanda Baron
Understanding consumer needs is a huge pain point for every business. A lot of sales and marketing strategies that have been developed revolve around getting the best possible idea of what a potential client wants and needs. What if there was a way to always be up to date what customers think of your products?
What is Google scraping?
Google scraping is a small subset of automated online data acquisition. Put simply, instead of acquiring required data by hand, companies develop automated tools to help out with this goal. Generally, these applications go to URLs and download the page source code. This source code is then searched and parsed for the required data.
When Google scraping is performed, all the steps are nearly identical except for the destination and what data is acquired. Google scrapers usually accept queries from interested parties and then deliver parsed data at scale. Data is then analyzed to generate insights into search engine algorithms, rankings and many other important marketing factors.
Quite ironically, Google isn’t too keen on letting automated applications send queries to their search engine. Yet, they have built their entire business around a roaming robot that collects information in an identical manner to a web scraper and indexes it.
As Google attempts to prevent automated programs from sending queries to their search engine, they employ a few anti-bot measures. It all starts out with a simple CAPTCHA. If that is solved, access to the search engine is regained for some time. If after the CAPTCHA, Google still thinks that the queries are being sent from a bot, a temporary IP block will be enacted. Often, these don’t last long as Google simply cannot ban most IP addresses as they usually belong to regular internet users. In special cases, Google might perform a long-term network ban on an offending IP address if it seems to come from a specialized location (e.g. a data center).
Using Google scrapers for business data
There are two types of actionable information that are incredibly useful for any business: customer feedback and competitor data. By utilizing both in an effective manner, companies can greatly improve their returns. How does Google scraping come into play here?
An unfortunate fact of most businesses is that customers leave feedback on products all over the internet. Often they will even compare products from competitors, providing important insights into how improvements might be made. Yet, finding all of these reviews and feedback can be a chore. Sometimes it might be nearly impossible.
Google scrapers such as SERPMaster come into play in a very simple way – businesses can acquire large amounts of data on their products by sending a few simple queries. For example, sending a query to Google Search with “[product name] review” to a scraper will deliver all search results that match the query in a readable manner. Data analysts can then review all the websites where product reviews, overviews and any other comments were published and easily collect all online feedback.
By consistently using a Google scraper, businesses can collect customer feedback and product reviews and create actionable insights and improvements. Data analysis can provide a clear way and easy way to generate increasing amounts of revenue by simply solving customer issues that normally would not be visible.
On the other hand, Google scraping need not be limited to just internal matters. Google scraping can be utilized to gain insight into competitor products and strategy. For example, acquiring competitor product reviews can provide a lot of insight on both possible issues and improvements. One of the most useful ways to utilize competitor analysis is to find their customer pain points and solve them by applying the knowledge to their own products.
Finally, scraping might be utilized to beat out the competition in search engine result pages. Simply keeping track of any changes in rankings might provide insight into strategy employed by them to improve their position in SERPs. Always having knowledge on what your competitors are doing is an undeniable strategic advantage in business.
Google data and ease of access
Just a few years (or a decade) ago getting access to large amounts of scraped data from Google would require innovation, a large amount of resources, and time. Then the developed scraper would need to be maintained and constantly updated with knowledge acquired mostly through trial and error.
Nowadays nearly anyone can access large amounts of Google data by simply utilizing services that provide scraping services. Instead of managing everything in-house which is always a challenge, businesses can delegate the task to other providers and focus on analyzing the data they need.
There are increasing amounts of scraping service providers often not limited to Google. Most services provide access to scraped data from any search engine, e-commerce sites, etc. The only thing needed to make use of such data is having an analysis team.
Conclusion
Supercharging business initiatives with data is now easier than ever. By utilizing big data acquired from web scraping services, businesses can shoot ahead of their competition. Nearly any business that has a presence online can make use of data from search engines and e-commerce sites to drive their revenue upwards.
